Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Christopher Stone wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 6:24 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 May 2008 15:54:52 -0700
>> "Christopher Stone" <chris.stone at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> If it's that simple, you should be able to do it yourself.  The code is
>>>> there.  Have at it.
>>>>
>>>> (HINT: It's not simple at all)
>>>
>>> According to this thread it seems pretty simple actually:
>>>
>>> http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=188645
>> Sure.  Creating them locally is simple.  Then all you'd have to do is
>> get it past review, get the primary Xorg maintainer to agree, and
>> support it for the entire release.  Which includes handling all the bug
>> reports for it.  Which you might get a lot of and won't be able
>> to do a damn thing about because of binary drivers.
> 
> I don't give a hoot if the packages are supported or not, I just want
> an easy way to get my nVidia card working.  All you people do is gripe
> and moan about how much work it would be and all this and that.  Look,
> its just a matter of adding rpms to a repo, make an "unsupported" repo
> if you have to.  The bottom line is you want to have as many people
> testing the OS as possible.
> 
Then please, make your own repo for those people who do not want 
supported, qa'd, bug-fixed packages.  However, in Fedora all of these 
things fit into the definition of a maintained package.  So by that 
measure I'd say ajax is doing a very, very good job making sure Fedora 9 
will have a robust upstream community supporting it for the life of the 
release whereas sticking the old xorg version into the distro when its 
known that no one's going to spend time working on it would be plainly 
irresponsible.

>>> If redhat wants to pay me $100k a year, I'll happily make xorg compat
>>> rpms in about one day.  Thank you very much.
>> I believe that shows your fundamental lack of understanding about
>> Fedora and open source software on many levels.
> 
> I believe you have no idea what you are talking about.  If I
> maintained a package which I knew was not going to work with 50% of
> the users hardware, and I was being paid to maintain this package,
> then I certainly would spend some time to allow those 50% a way to use
> their hardware with the rest of the OS.  Nothing more to it than that,
> it has nothing to do with open source, it has everything to do with
> being professional.
> 
Uhm... xorg-x11-drv-vesa?  xorg-x11-drv-nv?  xorg-x11-drv-nouveau?  I 
think some time has been spent "to allow those 50% a way to use their 
hardware with the rest of the OS".

You're asking for the wrong thing here.  You want X to support optional 
features of your hardware.  The means you're proposing to accomplish 
this is by adding an unmaintained software package into the distro until 
a proprietary driver is fixed to support it.  This doesn't strike me as 
a good way for Fedora to proceed and you're unlikely to get any traction 
  for making a change there.

If you want to talk about adding a properly maintained package to the 
distro to support a proprietary driver you might have a little more 
agreement.  If you wanted to talk about adding support for the optional 
features of your hardware to the distro you'd be applauded by all 
(though you'd probably be told that doing that work upstream where it 
can benefit all of the Xorg-using community is the proper venue.)

-Toshio