Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Bill Crawford]

2008/5/21 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>:

> No, the point is that it is a pre-release version of X, shipped will full
> knowledge that it will break binary drivers that no reasonable person would
> expect to be modified to match yet.

I don't know where to start with the logical fallacies in this but ...

It's not "prerelease" in any sense except "the release not hasn't gone
out yet". The upstream developers want this shipped, and have decided
the ABI is complete. It could have been labelled "1.5" and the same
thing would still be happening.

It doesn't "break" binary drivers. Binary drivers compiled to work
with an older version need modification to work correctly with it, but
so do all the ones included with it and ... they have been, as they
were available to modify.

A reasonable person with knowledge of the development process would
know about the "breakage" ahead of time and could have done the work
to port their driver to the new, slightly modified interface (the
changes are incremental for the most part, and the majority of the
APIs and ABIs involved haven't really changed that much at all).

They did have knowledge of all this (the X development community is
hardly close-lipped about the changes; there are regular "heads up"
type messages from e.g. Keith Packard about the changes to RandR and
so on).

This means that in actual fact, you are complaining (loudly) about the
failure of nVidia to provide updated drivers for you new distribution,
and expect "us" to provide "you" with a Fedora 9 but without the new
graphics functionality which apparently a lot of people want.