rfc/headsup: graphics driver packaging in F16+

[Casey Dahlin]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 02:01:26PM -0400, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-04-12 at 13:57 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 01:48:19PM -0400, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
> > > 
> > > With this approach, you have lost a critical feature: the ability for
> > > you to change your hardware (or move the software bits to a different
> > > computer) and have everything automatically work.
> > > 
> > > Nathaniel
> > 
> > You lose it for a couple of strange usecases though:
> > 
> > 1) Moving from a card that is up to date in what it supports to an older
> > card that isn't (rare).
> > 
> > 2) Moving from one crappy ancient card to another (plausible, but still
> > rare).
> > 
> > The vesa driver should mean some workable video support in either case,
> > and from there, if we were really, truly concerned, we could detect the
> > need for the driver and prompt to install it. That's starting to sound
> > like the bad old days of kudzu though, and I'd be surprised if anyone
> > really felt this was worth that effort.
> 
> I think losing it in those cases is probably acceptable.  My thought is
> that the disk space for drivers is minimal, lets just support everything
> (or at least the current stuff) in a single install.  My concern isn't
> moving to and/or between rare old cards.  My concern is moving from
> nouveau to intel or radeon...  The "big" drivers should definitely be
> installed on every system, regardless of its hardware.
> 

I believe (and maybe I've read this thread to quickly) that that will
still be the case. Its only the drivers for old cards with smaller
feature sets that are being moved at alll.

--CJD