Removing unwanted xorg-x11-drv packages

[Steven Haigh]

On 05/09/2006, at 11:41 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:36 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
>> Then I wonder what the point was to splitting them up? I was one who
>> thought
>> this would be a great time to jettison all the old video card  
>> drivers.
>> Like
>> when would you ever install a Tseng video card? Or S3? And if you  
>> did,
>> won't
>> the Vesa drivers work well enough until you install a more optimized
>> driver?
>
> Now when an update is made to an upstream driver, the X maintainer  
> just
> has to respin the driver, not the entire Xorg blob.  An update can be
> made just for the driver package which is a MUCH smaller download than
> the entire Xorg blob.  If in the future we get some way of doing  
> dynamic
> package loading based on hardware detection, then we can trim out the
> packages.

I understand the reasons for going modular, and I love the idea. I  
guess the big question in my mind is why do I care if the s3 driver  
or vmware driver has a security hole and needs an update? Sure, I  
won't be using it - ever - which means it can have all the holes in  
there it likes, it will never get run. Keeping this in mind, why  
would I want to bother downloading updates for X drivers that I don't  
have?

Even at worst case, and I did pull my laptop apart, desoldered the  
video chips and upgraded the card (or simply replaced the card in a  
desktop :)), then hopefully I'd know that I can install the latest  
driver via yum from a console (even if X completely refused to work!).

Following this even further, even if I didn't know what graphics card  
drivers are out there, I could use 'yum list xorg-x11-drv*' to get a  
list and go from there.

Maybe this is best dealt with in the installer - as it already setup  
up X to work after the installation, it could easily know what video  
driver to install and choose not to install the rest.

I guess I just see it as another 58 or so packages I don't have to  
worry about or see or update.

-- 
Steven Haigh

Email: netwiz at crc.id.au
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