Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Dave Airlie]

On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 22:30 -0500, Erich Zigler wrote:
> I have been reading this thread all evening and quite frankly it makes
> me sick to my stomach. I consider Fedora developers and users to be
> the cream of the crop of the Linux community. Unfortunately this
> thread has not shown that to be the case. I am horrified for any one
> who happens upon this thread via the mailing list archive as an
> example of what the Fedora community is about. I would like to make
> the following points in regard to this issue.
> 
> 1. As a Fedora user who uses Fedora as a desktop machine and requires
> the bits that the proprietary binary Nvidia driver provides I am not a
> second class user. Individuals who have the ability to run OSS video
> drivers are not any better or worse then I am they just have different
> needs and requirements.
> 
> 2. Demanding that a Red Hat employee who may or may not be paid to
> work on Fedora is not doing his job is distasteful. I have been
> involved in quite a few OSS projects over the years and OSS is about
> freedom. The freedom to work on what you find interesting or feel
> there is a need for. If an individual is not happy with how things are
> going the individual is free to make the changes they feel are
> important or help facilitate that change.  OSS development is largely
> powered by volunteers.
> 
> 3. The root issue is that Fedora shipped a prerelease version of Xorg
> that many are unhappy with. They are mainly unhappy with this fact
> because it shortens the time they can use Fedora 9 due to their
> hardware issues. This decision affected a portion of the user base. I
> hope that the thought and consideration went in to such a decision as
> this kind of Fedora backlash was expected. As geeks we always want the
> latest and greatest and Fedora 9 symbolizes that. This again does not
> make them second class users.
> 
> 4. Not everyone is as up to date on what is and is not supported as we
> are. We must remember the little guy. The user who is just starting
> out with Linux or is still a novice. The user who runs the upgrade and
> expects everything to work as it did in Fedora 8. Fedora is a great
> distribution but we all know how FUD can overtake a great thing.
> 
> 5. Expecting Fedora to cater to proprietary video card drivers is
> unrealistic. However it is not unrealistic to keep the user in mind
> when making such design decisions. More individuals were positively
> affected by the decision to include a prerelease version of Xorg then
> not. In the future I would recommend getting out in front of issues
> such as this as to prepare the user base. A subpoint under the Xorg
> portion of the Release Notes stating that version xx.yy of Nvidia
> drivers and version xx.yy of ATI drivers would not work with Fedora 9
> I feel would have helped tremendously.

Can't people read or something?

I just posted why 3 and 5 aren't in any way true.

Let me repeat via cut-n-paste:
1. X.org ABI for 1.5 is what we ship in F9, this hasn't changed in
months, I've ported 15 other drivers to it in this time. It will not
change before 1.5 final is released.

2. Nvidia don't release drivers for X.org releases.

3. Nvidia only bother releasing  drivers when a distro has shipped the
ABI. Now we happen to be the first distro to ship most things, so we get
to be distro that nvidia have to port their drivers to. Other distros
lag releasing, however it won't help us if we lag, as Nvidia won't do
anything until one of Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, RHEL, or SLED do a
release.

I was as much responsible for shipping 1.5 pre-release in Fedora as ajax
was, and funnily these threads actually move me to break the nvidia
driver more often rather than less :-)

Dave.