Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Jason Tang <jtang at magma.ca> wrote:
> The only problem being that this release is incompatible with current
> nvidia drivers.  Granted, I'm aware of the Fedora position regarding
> non-OSS, but this Xorg issue has completely destroyed many user's
> confidence in the dev team.

This would have happened even if Xorg's release was on time and we
were shipping a blessed xorg server 1.5.    The internal changes in
the xserver which break nvidia's drivers would still be there... and
Nvidia would still wait for a distribution to ship with those changes
before releasing a driver. Those of us who have run versions of Fedora
from FC1 onward have seen this happen before. And it will happen
again.  The only reason why we didnt see it recently is because X has
been somewhat stagnant. The fact that we are releasing 1.4.99 instead
of 1.5 isn't the reason why this is happening.   Nvidia will always
lag when an Xorg codebase change requires drivers to be updated.  The
changes that were incompatible with nvidia have been in the Xorg that
Fedora 9 is shipping for months now. I'm sure Nvidia is aware of them.

>
> Most users could care less about supposed 'valid' reasons - that fact
> is: No 3D acceleration == No F9 adoption (or worse, an eroding user
> base).  Lets not play this game with F10.

While this is certainly not ideal.. close source drivers will never be
ideal...you need to take a long view with regard to Nvidia. Xorg is
free to make changes, Fedora will adopt those changes. When the
Xserver has internal changes which break drivers...nvidia's drivers
availability will lag. This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact
that xserver 1.5 isn't officially released. Nvidia could have chosen
to release beta drivers to users over a month ago built against
xserver 1.4.99...which would have continued to work with xserver 1.5
on release.

Those of us who have followed Fedora from FC1 or earlier from the RHL
era, know how this works. When Fedora includes a version of X makes an
internal change which is incompatible, nvidia lags with the release of
new drivers by at least two weeks. There is a track record here.

-jef