Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Jason Tang <jtang at magma.ca> wrote:
> 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'.

2/3 of the userbase? Are you relying on smolt stats for that?

Please read the
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=107725&page=3 thread
comment #42 for what is probably a very accurate picture of the timeline here.

The whole thread is actually a valuable read.  There was more than
enough time for Nvidia to release beta drivers against the stable ABI
if they desired to do so.

Look at it this way... what if we did all our open driver development
like nvidia does. What if the open video drivers were not ported until
xserver 1.5 was officially released? Would there be any value at all
in doing open video driver development that way? The changes that the
nvidia driver need are surely on par with the changes the open drivers
needed and they could have been done in the same timescale.  The real
question is why isn't NVidia syncing their driver development with the
upstream process? And we aren't going to answer that here.

-jef