ubuntu bulletproof x

[Adam Jackson]

On Sat, 2007-09-01 at 16:03 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> Adam Jackson wrote:
> 
> > If I were being cynical, I'd say a large part of the reason they'll be
> > moderately successful at this whole 'bulletproof' thing is due to work
> > I've already put in to fixing autoconfiguration within X itself, and
> > that the press releases are just so much propaganda.  Don't get me
> > wrong, Fedora sucks at self-publicity, we should do better, but all I
> > see in that project is prettier UI and not technical correctness.  If
> > you do it _right_, you don't ever have to admit failure.  Asking for the
> > inf file is admitting failure.
> 
> I suspect you'll tell me why I'm wrong-  But aren't there (a significant 
> number of) situations where autodetect fails, and in fact due to 
> hardware limitations can't succeed, but the process of the user 
> specifying the monitor type, and info, from the driver CD, will cause 
> success?
> 
> Even if those situations account for 1/10,000 users, those are precisely 
> the cases that need to be covered to market something as "bulletproof".
> 
> Now of course, it won't solve the problem of the user getting confused 
> and using the wrong CD for the monitor...

Yeah, okay, force me to clarify.  Grumble.

There are cases where we can't tell what monitor the user has.  They're
almost completely described by "either the card can't do DDC, or the
cable is broken".  The former is a vanishingly small class of hardware,
voodoo1 basically.  The latter happens depressingly often particularly
with projector setups.

In either case, asking for the windows CD won't tell you what you want
to know.  It will tell you sync ranges, when what you _want_ to know is
desired resolution and display type (as in, CRT, LCD, beamer, whatever).
Afterwards you can validate that against the sync ranges from the INF
file if you want, but really, either it'll work or it won't, and asking
for the CD won't make it work better.

It's a red herring, is my point.  It's a non-feature.  It's like going
to buy a Ferrari and the salesman keeps talking about how great the
cupholders are.  They might be great, truly exemplary, but they're not
really what you're interested in.

- ajax