Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Jason Tang]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Jason Tang <jtang at magma.ca> wrote:
>   
>> The only problem being that this release is incompatible with current
>> nvidia drivers.  Granted, I'm aware of the Fedora position regarding
>> non-OSS, but this Xorg issue has completely destroyed many user's
>> confidence in the dev team.
>>     
>
> This would have happened even if Xorg's release was on time and we
> were shipping a blessed xorg server 1.5.    The internal changes in
> the xserver which break nvidia's drivers would still be there... and
> Nvidia would still wait for a distribution to ship with those changes
> before releasing a driver. Those of us who have run versions of Fedora
> from FC1 onward have seen this happen before. And it will happen
> again.  The only reason why we didnt see it recently is because X has
> been somewhat stagnant. The fact that we are releasing 1.4.99 instead
> of 1.5 isn't the reason why this is happening.   Nvidia will always
> lag when an Xorg codebase change requires drivers to be updated.  The
> changes that were incompatible with nvidia have been in the Xorg that
> Fedora 9 is shipping for months now. I'm sure Nvidia is aware of them.
>
>   
>> Most users could care less about supposed 'valid' reasons - that fact
>> is: No 3D acceleration == No F9 adoption (or worse, an eroding user
>> base).  Lets not play this game with F10.
>>     
>
> While this is certainly not ideal.. close source drivers will never be
> ideal...you need to take a long view with regard to Nvidia. Xorg is
> free to make changes, Fedora will adopt those changes. When the
> Xserver has internal changes which break drivers...nvidia's drivers
> availability will lag. This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact
> that xserver 1.5 isn't officially released. Nvidia could have chosen
> to release beta drivers to users over a month ago built against
> xserver 1.4.99...which would have continued to work with xserver 1.5
> on release.
>
> Those of us who have followed Fedora from FC1 or earlier from the RHL
> era, know how this works. When Fedora includes a version of X makes an
> internal change which is incompatible, nvidia lags with the release of
> new drivers by at least two weeks. There is a track record here.
>
> -jef
>
>   
If F9 was shipping a stable Xserver 1.5, the Nvidia devs would likely 
have had time to update their drivers, or at least have a head start on 
the process.  Regardless, IMHO there's more than enough blame to go 
around:  Fedora, Xorg, Nvidia.

I just don't think neglecting 2/3 of the user base makes sense.  The 
fact is, many people use nvidia hardware.  It would have seemed that 
pushing Xorg 1.4.99 to the development repo would have made more sense 
from a stability perspective.  After all, it is a 'pre-release'.

- J