Removing unwanted xorg-x11-drv packages
Steven Haigh
netwiz at crc.id.au
Tue Sep 5 14:53:10 UTC 2006
On 05/09/2006, at 11:41 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:36 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
>> Then I wonder what the point was to splitting them up? I was one who
>> thought
>> this would be a great time to jettison all the old video card
>> drivers.
>> Like
>> when would you ever install a Tseng video card? Or S3? And if you
>> did,
>> won't
>> the Vesa drivers work well enough until you install a more optimized
>> driver?
>
> Now when an update is made to an upstream driver, the X maintainer
> just
> has to respin the driver, not the entire Xorg blob. An update can be
> made just for the driver package which is a MUCH smaller download than
> the entire Xorg blob. If in the future we get some way of doing
> dynamic
> package loading based on hardware detection, then we can trim out the
> packages.
I understand the reasons for going modular, and I love the idea. I
guess the big question in my mind is why do I care if the s3 driver
or vmware driver has a security hole and needs an update? Sure, I
won't be using it - ever - which means it can have all the holes in
there it likes, it will never get run. Keeping this in mind, why
would I want to bother downloading updates for X drivers that I don't
have?
Even at worst case, and I did pull my laptop apart, desoldered the
video chips and upgraded the card (or simply replaced the card in a
desktop :)), then hopefully I'd know that I can install the latest
driver via yum from a console (even if X completely refused to work!).
Following this even further, even if I didn't know what graphics card
drivers are out there, I could use 'yum list xorg-x11-drv*' to get a
list and go from there.
Maybe this is best dealt with in the installer - as it already setup
up X to work after the installation, it could easily know what video
driver to install and choose not to install the rest.
I guess I just see it as another 58 or so packages I don't have to
worry about or see or update.
--
Steven Haigh
Email: netwiz at crc.id.au
Web: http://www.crc.id.au
Phone: (03) 9017 0597 - 0412 935 897
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