Mesa Developers Weigh Renaming Gallium "State Tracker" To "API"
In addition to the discussion over potentially dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa or otherwise potentially forking a portion of the code, AMD's Marek Olšák made a separate proposal about renaming the Gallium3D "state tracker" concept to being "API" implementations.
Gallium3D state tracker terminology has been around a decade now in referring to the portions of the architecture that are ultimately implementing various graphics / compute / video APIs. Marek proposed keeping the Mesa OpenGL state tracker term but in renaming the other state trackers to being "API implementations" as that terminology is technically more accurate for the likes of Clover OpenCL, VA-API, VDPAU, and the other state trackers / APIs implemented.
Though not all developers agree with the value of this change in likely leading to confusion, not worth the potential conflicts when re-basing / back-porting patches across this change, and perhaps just being easier to describe it in the documentation that Gallium3D state trackers are principally just API implementations.
The debate over state tracker vs. API implementation terminology is happening via this merge request.
Gallium3D state tracker terminology has been around a decade now in referring to the portions of the architecture that are ultimately implementing various graphics / compute / video APIs. Marek proposed keeping the Mesa OpenGL state tracker term but in renaming the other state trackers to being "API implementations" as that terminology is technically more accurate for the likes of Clover OpenCL, VA-API, VDPAU, and the other state trackers / APIs implemented.
Though not all developers agree with the value of this change in likely leading to confusion, not worth the potential conflicts when re-basing / back-porting patches across this change, and perhaps just being easier to describe it in the documentation that Gallium3D state trackers are principally just API implementations.
The debate over state tracker vs. API implementation terminology is happening via this merge request.
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