Stable Release Updates types proposal

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2010-03-20 at 07:14 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 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!

This isn't really true. Or at least, not a productive perspective for
improving Fedora. There are certainly a lot of bugs in the open drivers
shipped with Fedora, and there's a lot of work to do to fix them all. I
sent my own reply to Terry explaining how we're handling this at
present, but just waving the 'it's all NVIDIA's fault' stick at the
problem won't make it go away :)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net