support for latest (radeon) hardware

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 24.01.2009 18:51, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-01-24 at 18:34 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>  
>> * Fedora in most areas is good for new hardware, as you get new drivers 
>> (hplip, gutenprint, sane,...) and even new kernels as regular update, 
>> which improves hardware support (especially for current hardware) over 
>> time. But Fedora not only would be "good for new hardware", it could 
>> have "fantastic support for new hardware" if support for other new 
>> hardware (like the big bunch of the Radeon HD 4xxx series) also could 
>> find it's way into the stable distro.
> Keep in mind that this constant kernel revving comes with a cost. 

Sure, I'm well aware of it.

> Look
> at the bodhi karma each time we try to bring a new kernel version to a
> release.  For everything we fix, we likely break something else (like
> various sound issues on intel recently).  Upstream isn't perfect, and if
> I had to choose between supporting new people, or keeping existing
> people unbroken, I'll choose on the side of existing people every time.

I partly agree and disagree here:

  * yes, sure, regressions have to be avoided

  * bugs OTOH happen and they need to get fixed sooner or later anyway, 
as they otherwise will bite the user with the next or overnext Fedora 
release, as Fedora users have to update to it sooner or later anyway if 
they want to get security fixes for their distro.

Please note that above description for the second point leaves out a lot 
of details; discussing those here IMHO doesn't make much sense, hence 
I'll try to keep away from discussing that point more, because the real 
question simply is:

How to keep existing people happy while at the same time get drivers for 
new hardware out to the users as soon as possible, to make sure that 
they can run Linux/Fedora(¹)?


CU
knurd

(¹) And no, "Just ship new kernels and drivers with the next release" 
(e.g.every six months) is IMHO no proper answer, as some hardware 
manufactures itself have devel cycles in the 6 - 12 month range