Update guidelines?

[Mike A. Harris]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> *1 -- /me really hopes that FC5 gets a update of X.org to 7.1 soon
> because that way we would improve hardware support even more

Actually, that's exactly what we're planning on doing in the near
future, so crack the champagne. ;)   Before anyone asks about "when"
this is going to happen, I hereby declare the offical universal
developer response to that:  When it's ready.

Anyone questioning that answer with another question, the answer to
their next question is:  Proportionately sooner the less people who
ask about it.

;o)

> (FC5 still has no support for Intels 945GM IIRC and that's really
 > frustrating :-/

I just checked the FC5 i810 driver source, and it appears you're
correct.  If it's in rawhide tho, it'll be part of the FC5 update
to 7.1 too.

> ). Updated X-drivers would also be a good start, but it seems that's
> still a hard job even in times of modular X.

There are basically 2 ways to do driver updates:

1) By updating a driver to a newer upstream version.

2) By patching the current driver with bugfixes for specific
    issues, etc.

Since X.Org 7.0 was released however, there have not been very
many driver updates released for the 7.0 X server.  I believe
we released an 'ati' update, but don't specifically remember if
any others were done off the top of my head.  The majority of
upstream drivers newer than that are for the X.Org 7.1 X server,
and so we need 7.1 in FC5 before we can release any of the latest
driver support for FC5.  The alternative to that is to allocate
manpower to backporting drivers, but since we are going to be
releasing 7.1 anyway in the near future, it would be a big waste
of our limited resources to backport lots of stuff and release
updates when we will get them for free soon enough.

The actual internal process of releasing a driver update for
Fedora with modular X is drop dead simple, and also very fast.
If there's a new upstream driver tarball for a given driver,
it's a matter of about 10-20 minutes to download it, update
it in CVS, build it in brew.  While that's happening it takes
about 5 minutes overlapping to file a Fedora update advisory.
Assuming the package builds, it takes 2 seconds to submit it
to release engineering, and then it goes public whenever they
check their email or whatever and push the button.

So, it's trivial to do the update when there is a new upstream
tarball for the supported X server release that is shipping in
the distribution.

If people are interested in seeing more frequent driver updates
however, X.Org is always interested in having more volunteers
contributing their time, code, documentation, etc.  If there
are bug fixes for a given problem, anyone out there can backport
them to a previous release if desired, and get involved in the
process of helping X.Org do updates.

That would not only be a great service to Fedora users, but to
the entire community of X users out there.

Any takers?


-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.