Fedora 12 Graphics Issues: Cancel F13 and concentrate on fixing F12 ?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-11-27 at 09:35 +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:

> Also mentioned then I thought it would be good to have a basic, and simple
> for users, graphics testing system to easily allow users to test and
> feedback issues. Even if this is simply a short list of 2D/3D applications
> and a list of operations to try. Would a graphics testing day on F12 with
> the special graphics repo and some basic list of tests be useful to the
> developers ?

You mean, just like the three F12 graphics test days, with basic lists
of tests and special live spins, which we already did? :)

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-09_Radeon
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-10_Nouveau
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-11_Intel

So, here's my general take on this. First, as has been pointed out,
several of your issues were encountered when running the NVIDIA
proprietary driver. There is no way we can sensibly do any work on
NVIDIA driver issues as we have no source for the driver. There's no way
we can tell what's going wrong or fix it. It's just a complete
non-starter. And no, we can't even forward the bugs to NVIDIA, because
they don't have a bug tracking system. What they have is a guy who reads
the Linux / NVIDIA forums at nvnews.net and Phoronix, and that's it. All
we can really do is advise you to post your problem there.

Second, I do understand your frustration, really I do. I do quite a lot
of X triage, and it is noticeable that issues are often not fixed in the
release against which they're reported. However, there are really
genuinely good reasons for this. Mainly, as Dave noted, it's very hard
to implement fixes in X for stable releases and be sure they don't cause
regressions; again as he noted, we're hoping to work on a system to make
this a bit more possible. But also importantly, the 'upstream /
downstream divide' that's being discussed in this thread isn't so
simple, for Fedora. To a large extent, Fedora is _part_ of upstream, for
X server, radeon and nouveau especially. The people who package and
develop X in Fedora are also major upstream developers, and the work
they do tends to be genuine development work rather than integration /
fix backporting. Dave and Jerome are major contributors to radeon driver
development, Ben is a major contributor to nouveau driver development,
and all of them along with Adam contribute to X server development. So,
a lot of what our X team is doing is actually driving the major forward
progress of these components - not just fixing specific bugs but working
on support for new hardware, and new features / architecture like KMS
and DRI2 and GEM. So they tend to work by pulling fixes into new
development. A lot of issues reported in, say, 10 and 11 actually got
noticed by the developers and worked on, but they were worked on in such
a way that the fix isn't a minimal band-aid that it's trivially simple
to backport to that release. The fix got incorporated into significant
development work which would not be straightforward to backport without
the possibility of causing a regression.

It would, of course, be theoretically possible for Fedora's X team to
spend less time working on important new driver development and more
time working on minimal-impact fixes for the existing releases, but
that's not the same as saying it would be _desirable_. In the long run,
getting the major development done really needs to happen.

As Dave has implied several times in the thread, there are several
openings here for community involvement, and that would be great. It
would be entirely possible for volunteers to get involved both in
testing and development work, especially in building and testing update
packages for stable releases. But it's not something that we could
simply redirect existing development towards without suffering
significant consequences in other areas.

The Bugzappers also always happy to have more people volunteer to help
with X.org bug triage; it's a lot of work to keep on top of.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Joining

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net