Stable Release Updates types proposal

[Kevin Kofler]

Terry Barnaby wrote:
> Although I understand Fedora's frontier status, I think the graphics
> system changes could probably have been handled better. After the kernel
> and core shared libraries the graphics system is probably the next
> essential core OS subsystem (At least for desktop systems). It seems most
> of peoples stability issues with fedora stem from graphics. I do
> understand the difficulty with the multitude of different graphics
> chipsets out there. But this is where Fedora could shine with its close
> links to upstream development. It would have been good to be very upfront
> with this and get a group to define and setup some basic graphics tests
> and loudly promote users to perform tests with these both pre-release and
> post-release. This with a website with test status versus graphics
> board/chipsets and with good easy linkages to Bugzilla (more user
> friendly) and perhaps a separate graphics-testing repository to keep quick
> graphics updates away from the "stable" release etc. If enough upstream
> developers, Fedora packagers and testing users were in on this I think
> great inroads into getting stable and good graphics systems would be made
> in a relatively short time.

Unfortunately, a sizeable portion of our users installs some crappy 
proprietary driver, sometimes not even a properly packaged one, but using 
some broken installation script directly from the hardware vendor's website, 
making this all moot. :-( While it is true that our Free drivers are far 
from perfect as well, most graphics-related problems are actually due to 
proprietary drivers. Just say NO to proprietary drivers! (And in fact this 
is one of the reasons why our drivers are a bit on the experimental side, 
it's needed to get support for as much hardware as possible with our Free 
drivers, e.g. there's now experimental 3D support for Nouveau in F13.)

        Kevin Kofler