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 thoughtthis would be a great time to jettison all the old video card drivers.Likewhen 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 justhas 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 thanthe entire Xorg blob. If in the future we get some way of doing dynamicpackage 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 crc id au Web: http://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9017 0597 - 0412 935 897