some closure on the xorg updates issue

[David Nielsen]

fre, 11 08 2006 kl. 15:32 +0200, skrev Thorsten Leemhuis: 
> Rahul schrieb:
> > Kevin Kofler wrote:
> >> Rahul <sundaram <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:
> >>>>> In short, it's a major change with only modest benefit, and a 
> >>>>> better solution is coming soon.
> >>>> And what IS that "better solution"?
> >>> A well defined updates policy with the release engineering team to 
> >>> grant exceptions when required.
> >>> Draft at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UpdatesPolicy
> >> And how is that a solution to the problem that an X.Org update is 
> >> needed to add support for some hardware (Intel) and improve support 
> >> for others (ATI r3xx/r4xx)?
> > It is not. We cant put everything that goes into rawhide into the 
> > general releases as update. [...]
> 
> Agreed for things like gnome 2.x -> 2.(x+2), but hardware support is a 
> special case IMHO. Consider this hypothetical example:
> 
> early april 20xx: FCx get releases with Xorg y.z
> mid april 20xx: Xorg y.(z+1) gets released with new drivers
> end april 20xx: Intel releases Chipset G1015 with integrated graphics
> early may 20xx: Intel releases updated drivers for G1015 that require 
> Xorg y.(z+1)
> 
> Those buying a Mainboard with G1015 need a solution then. They don't 
> want to wait 5 month until the next proper FC release. Or 2 month for a 
> beta (and most people don't want to run a beta).

The good news is that Intel started working with us, AMD/ATI are talking
about releasing free drivers for at least a subset of their products.
That basically leaves nVidia as the only binary crooks - what are the
odds that if everyone else starts working with upstream and releases
code, that they will start doing so to at one point. 

Regardless your scenerio should be safe in most cases as we would be
able to push a single driver update out rather than the whole tree to
add support, baring no ABI breakage happened of course. I think that
would be low risk enough provided it sat in updates-testing and
development for a while to get hammered at least considering the
benefits in terms of hardware support. 

Feel free to go support Intel for their fine move in support of free
software.

- David Nielsen