RFC: xserver update strategy in F21+

[Samuel Sieb]

On 11/17/2014 12:54 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> said:
>> IMHO, we should not let proprietary drivers hold us hostage that way. We do
>> not and should not support them. We don't even ship them. So we should just
>> upgrade X if the software we ship is ready for it. If some proprietary
>> driver breaks, its users get to keep the pieces.
>
> I agree to some extent, but in the real world, there are a significant
> number of Fedora users that use such third-party software.  Breaking it
> with no consideration will end up pushing users to other distributions,
> which shouldn't be done without forethought.
>
My opinion is strongly in line with Kevin, but Chris has a good point. 
However, isn't it possible to have both.  I'm not familiar with the 
proprietary drivers other than knowing that the NVidia one is available 
through rpmfusion.  (Out of the many varieties of laptops I've installed 
Fedora on (at least 30 different models from various manufacturers), 
I've only had one that required the NVidia driver.)  If the proprietary 
driver has a strong dependency on a certain X version, won't that just 
stop the X server from being upgraded?  In that case, everyone using the 
open drivers can upgrade and the others will just not get the new X 
server until they have new drivers available.  I expect this doesn't 
work if you compile from source though.  Are there many people that do that?