URGENT F14: Un-announced change to default dual-head config: intentional or accidental?

[Bastien Nocera]

On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 10:59 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 13:47 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Matthias Clasen (mclasen at redhat.com) said: 
> > > > Given how it got introduced (via the commit you pointed out), I guess
> > > > it'd make the most sense for us to ship an update which changes the
> > > > default to 'true', and report this upstream? Perhaps Joey didn't realize
> > > > this change has the effect of changing the previous default behaviour.
> > > > (I think previously the default was 'whatever X does', and for most
> > > > people/distros the X default would have been 'clone'; I think for Fedora
> > > > 13, the default was 'span'. Either way, it's not 'turn it off'.)
> > > 
> > > Looking at the code, if we change both keys to default to true, we'll
> > > end up with clone mode. If thats ok, we can do that. Its not 'whatever X
> > > does' either, though.
> > 
> > It sounds better than 'off' to me, at least. And clone mode is easier
> > to fix into span mode than span is easier to fix into clone mode, if
> > something goes wrong.
> 
> I guess we should ask Novell why they chose 'off' as the default. The
> other thing I'd like to clarify is if the code actually backs up its
> implicit claim of being restricted to 'laptop+external monitor" cases:
> is there really code in there to distinguish these from any other
> multihead case?
> 
> note that the X default to span was intentionally chosen by I think ajax
> during f13 cycle, so he presumably wants that to be the default...

We discussed this upstream, and we actually want to default to leaving
Xorg to setup the monitors how it pleases by default.

So this is how it's now going to be setup in the F14 update, and in
GNOME 3 (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=634092 for the
GNOME 3 changes).

Cheers