"DRM removal soon" is premature

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 4:30 PM Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu
wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 02:58:10PM -0800, Ben Widawsky wrote:
> >
> > Not to pile on unnecessarily here, but I think the fundamental issue is
> that
> > there is nobody who wants to maintain the in-tree DRM, and removal is
> likely a
> > better option to half-assed maintenance. I'd imagine there'd be a
> different
> > discussion if several developers were clamoring to keep this driver well
> > maintained in the tree.
> >
>
> Unhooking a driver from the build, so that it cannot expose
> a change that breaks said driver is certainly a way to
> ensure the driver is not maintained.
>

It was already unmaintained.

Wasted a weekend trying to find and attempting to fix the
> damage caused by a change in src/sys to the drm-legacy-kmod
> port.  You know, the port that was promised as part of the
> drm2 removal.  I would have spent this weekend testing
> changes to cexp, cexpf, the soon-to-be-submitted cexpl,
> ccosh, ccoshf, and the soon-to-be-submitted ccoshl.  That's
> all on hold now as I'm not sure when I'll be able to carve
> out time for testing.
>

That is unfortunate. The root cause though is that the config you are using
is on the trailing edge. It would have been fixed, in that it would have
built, but I'm pretty sure it would have still broken because no one is
using this config. I'd argue that having it in the tree too long, including
in 12, lead to an expectation that would continue to work when we knew a
year ago there was a high risk of undetected breakage happening. And
wasting your time because of those unrealistic expectations we've fostered
is definitely not a good outcome.

So I too am frustrated. And I'm sorry that it is causing you pain.

Warner

>