Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Dave Airlie]

On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 20:48 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 8:35 PM, Dave Airlie <airlied at redhat.com> wrote:
> > I was as much responsible for shipping 1.5 pre-release in Fedora as ajax
> > was, and funnily these threads actually move me to break the nvidia
> > driver more often rather than less :-)
> 
> I think you are missing the point.  Just because nVidia sucks, it
> doesn't mean we have to make Fedora "suck".  This is linux, and it
> should be possible to have a system which everyone can enjoy.  With
> just a little bit of extra effort, a set of stable xorg rpms could
> have been provided in a f9 testing repo for nVidia users to use
> temporarily.  We can still make a distro which is friendly to nVidia
> users without slowing down progress for everyone else.  I see this
> mainly as a user friendliness issue more than an open source vs closed
> source issue.  I hope Josh is correct and we will have some nVidia
> drivers to test with soon.

The thing is there are much more binary drivers than nvidia, if we take
the attitude we should support binary driver users, we would end up
having an Xorg for nvidia, and Xorg for fglrx, and Xorg for parhelia,
and Xorg for 3dlabs, along with a kernel for each. The thing is we
can't.

If it takes me one or two days to do packages for a driver I'm not even
going to download onto my system, that is one or two days I'm not
pushing forward the open source graphics system. Both myself and ajax's
primary roles in life is to work on Red Hat Enterprise products, we
manage to schedule a fair percentage of our time to work on Fedora and
upstream projects due to nice managers. If I was to give up one or two
days of this time to doing something for binary drivers, it would mean I
wouldn't get to spend those two days I've managed to drag myself away
from Enterprise stuff on making the open-source drivers work as well as
I can in the time allowed. So you want me to spend my time supporting a
company that won't help me, just because you gave them money?

Dave.