Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Jason Tang <jtang at magma.ca> wrote:
> 2/3, 1/3...  1/4...   whatever.  I'm sure you understand my point that there
> are a large number or eager F9 users in pain out there.

What exactly do you want at this point? I'm prepared to get in front
of a camera, and do a video with a sincere apology to nvidia driver
users that we have chosen to provide better support for video hardware
with open drivers...than for closed source video drivers.
But nothing I can do is going to fix the problem in a way that you
want. We've never claimed to support nvidia drivers. If they
work..they work. If they don't they don't. We can't fix them...we
don't support them.  I'm not going to mince words about it.

> Granted, I don't follow the dev group all that closely, so hopefully you can
> forgive me for thinking that what we seem to have is a circle of groups
> blaming one another for their own collective failure to deliver.

Xorg has an open transparent process... we have an open transparent
process. We can't do anything more than be open and transparent.  If
Nvidia wants to have a discussion with Xorg concerning development and
release cycle I'm sure that would be a fascinating thing to read.

>
> Of course, I can and will wait for the drivers I need to work before
> upgrading my primary system.  Perhaps most of us 'users' would have been
> content with a heads-up about the nvidia breakage, and maybe a rough
> timeline of when to expect a fix.

We've known about the nvidia breakage for months now...since the
beginning of the F9 development phase really, when the snapshots of
the new xserver were put in rawhide..back when few of the open video
drivers worked. There was more than enough time for any contributor
who cared about the NVidia issue to submit something to the release
notes process specifically about the known NVidia problems.
We have an open community driven process for the release notes.  If
there is something specific you or any NVidia driver user wants added
perhaps you should look into participating in that Beat writing
process or talk to the Beat Writer for Xorg.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/ReleaseNotes/Beats
Obviously we can't point to 3rd party drivers...even if they did work.

But how can we tell you when Nvidia will fix things? Nvidia's
development process is opaque, they don't tell people when to expect
driver updates. We cannot impact when and what NVidia chooses to do
what they do, nor can we force to be more forth coming as to their
timelines.

> That way there would not have been so many struggling now.

Honestly I don't see how.  There is absolutely nothing we can do to
impact how Nvidia will respond when X needs to make an ABI change.
All we could do is put a big notice in our release notes that Fedora
does not support 3rd party proprietary hardware drivers..full stop.
Our release notes reference a long manifesto(which I didn't write even
though it's length would suggest I did) which amounts to such a
statement.  In the future I'll insist on a bolder statement explictly
stating that we do not support 3rd party drivers.  If the work..great.
If they don't...they don't..take it up with the driver developers.

-jef