Fedora Core 6 HUGE problem - Binary drivers.

[Les Mikesell]

Robin Laing wrote:

>> No, I'm not ignoring that part.  I'm saying that _is_ the problem.  If 
>> some other OS regularly made incompatible changes without coordinating 
>> the availability of drivers with releases they'd have been dead long ago.
>>
> But some other OS has support of the manufacturers for their drivers in 
> a big way.  This isn't the same so it isn't a fair comparison.  I think 
> nVidia is doing a great job in comparison to AMD/ATI.

Agreed, but I can't say that I blame ATI for avoiding work that would 
not be embraced by the distributions anyway.

>>> Seriously, you don't give Nvidia's devs enough credit, if
>>> their higher ups cared, their drivers would always work.
>>
>> Oh, I'm amazed they have kept trying this long. They have to be 
>> insanely frustrated by something that claims to be an OS but refuses 
>> to define an interface for drivers.
>>
> 
> In a thread way back some time ago, this was discussed.  The issue, if I 
> remember correctly is flexibility to make changes to the API, either for 
> improvements or security.  Of course it could be made easier.

Yes, it was understandable back when Linus was an inexperienced college 
student since he could claim not to know what might be needed.  It's a 
little late in the game to still be making that claim.  And it might 
still be understandable at major kernel revision number releases several 
  years apart as new technology is invented.  It doesn't make much sense 
to think that if the interface design was flawed in every version up to 
x.x.19 that the change in x.x.20 is finally going to be perfect even 
though it breaks all the existing drivers in the middle of a 
distribution life cycle.  Or, the distributions could just refuse to 
ship the wildly experimental stuff like they did when it was identified 
with an odd minor number.

>>> What are you talking about? My Fedora desktop was always usable.
>>
>> Did you have firewire drives mid FC5?  A good 6 months of downtime 
>> might have changed your mind.  The Evolution exchange connector was 
>> broken for about the same interval after a brief glimpse of a working 
>> version.  Not sure what you've been using....  Some stuff works most 
>> of the time.
>>
> 
> Some of the issues are outside Fedora's control. 

How so, when they have shipped a working version, then push out updates 
that break it?

> I read the Evolution 
> list and see enough comments about issues not being dealt with.  This 
> can be compounded by Fedora/RH making changes to their code to meet the 
> fears of litigation and lawyers big fees.  :)

So they broke it on purpose?  What about firewire?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com