Removing unwanted xorg-x11-drv packages

Rahul sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Tue Sep 5 15:02:54 UTC 2006


Steven Haigh wrote:
> On 05/09/2006, at 11:41 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:36 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
>>> Then I wonder what the point was to splitting them up? I was one who
>>> thought
>>> this would be a great time to jettison all the old video card drivers.
>>> Like
>>> when would you ever install a Tseng video card? Or S3? And if you did,
>>> won't
>>> the Vesa drivers work well enough until you install a more optimized
>>> driver?
>>
>> Now when an update is made to an upstream driver, the X maintainer just
>> has to respin the driver, not the entire Xorg blob.  An update can be
>> made just for the driver package which is a MUCH smaller download than
>> the entire Xorg blob.  If in the future we get some way of doing dynamic
>> package loading based on hardware detection, then we can trim out the
>> packages.
> 
> I understand the reasons for going modular, and I love the idea. I guess 
> the big question in my mind is why do I care if the s3 driver or vmware 
> driver has a security hole and needs an update? Sure, I won't be using 
> it - ever - which means it can have all the holes in there it likes, it 
> will never get run. Keeping this in mind, why would I want to bother 
> downloading updates for X drivers that I don't have?

This is the reason we need to handle this better but we can do so 
without getting the ability to install drivers on demand which we dont 
have currently.

> 
> Even at worst case, and I did pull my laptop apart, desoldered the video 
> chips and upgraded the card (or simply replaced the card in a desktop 
> :)), then hopefully I'd know that I can install the latest driver via 
> yum from a console (even if X completely refused to work!).
> 
> Following this even further, even if I didn't know what graphics card 
> drivers are out there, I could use 'yum list xorg-x11-drv*' to get a 
> list and go from there.

We cant expect everybody to know the names of the drivers and install 
them manually.

> 
> Maybe this is best dealt with in the installer - as it already setup up 
> X to work after the installation, it could easily know what video driver 
> to install and choose not to install the rest.
> 
> I guess I just see it as another 58 or so packages I don't have to worry 
> about or see or update.

You can force remove packages by ignoring the dependencies if this 
bothers you but that is not recommended at all.

Rahul




More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list