Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Christopher Stone]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Dave Airlie <airlied at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 20:48 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
>> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 8:35 PM, Dave Airlie <airlied at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > 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 :-)
>>
>> I think you are missing the point.  Just because nVidia sucks, it
>> doesn't mean we have to make Fedora "suck".  This is linux, and it
>> should be possible to have a system which everyone can enjoy.  With
>> just a little bit of extra effort, a set of stable xorg rpms could
>> have been provided in a f9 testing repo for nVidia users to use
>> temporarily.  We can still make a distro which is friendly to nVidia
>> users without slowing down progress for everyone else.  I see this
>> mainly as a user friendliness issue more than an open source vs closed
>> source issue.  I hope Josh is correct and we will have some nVidia
>> drivers to test with soon.
>
> The thing is there are much more binary drivers than nvidia, if we take
> the attitude we should support binary driver users, we would end up
> having an Xorg for nvidia, and Xorg for fglrx, and Xorg for parhelia,
> and Xorg for 3dlabs, along with a kernel for each. The thing is we
> can't.
>
> If it takes me one or two days to do packages for a driver I'm not even
> going to download onto my system, that is one or two days I'm not
> pushing forward the open source graphics system. Both myself and ajax's
> primary roles in life is to work on Red Hat Enterprise products, we
> manage to schedule a fair percentage of our time to work on Fedora and
> upstream projects due to nice managers. If I was to give up one or two
> days of this time to doing something for binary drivers, it would mean I
> wouldn't get to spend those two days I've managed to drag myself away
> from Enterprise stuff on making the open-source drivers work as well as
> I can in the time allowed. So you want me to spend my time supporting a
> company that won't help me, just because you gave them money?

I don't want you to spend time supporting a company, I want you to
spend time supporting the Fedora users who love their OS and would
love to be able to use their hardware to its fullest extent.  That is
all.  I really don't expect an xorg build for every binary blob out
there, but a stable version of xorg as an alternative for those who
are having problems with the beta version should have been given more
consideration in my opinion.