Limits to what can be done without source

[Andy Green]

Paul Michael Reilly wrote:

> I must be missing something incredibly simple here.  If I'm the
> "project lead" for Fedora, I find somebody who just knows and cares so
> much about X and anoint him or her to be the "X project lead".  This
> person cares so much to have a kick-ass X set of RPMs that they
> collect or build FOSS X software, drivers in this case, and build when
> it comes to ATI or nVidia.  So the first ATI or nVidia FOSS drivers
> suck dead moose balls, but more people want to scratch that itch,
> people using Suse or Ubuntu or Debian or whatever.

You're missing quite a bit.  Mike Harris is the Redhat Xorg expert 
already and is the reason you have a "kickass set of X RPMS" in Fedora.

> So along comes "pmr" who says dual head for ATI on a think pad doesn't
> cut it on Fedora.  Should the Fedora project lead (directly or
> indirectly) tell him to go elsewhere?  Or should pmr be encouraged to

Consider for a moment that you are Mike Harris and this complaint lands 
on your monitor.  Say you want to help.  What exactly is your next move? 
  Look at the ATI source to see what has gone wrong?  There isn't any, 
ATI refuse to give it out.  Should you, as valuable resource, then bust 
out a debugger and spend miserable weeks trawling through disassemblies 
to try to understand the origin of the problem, likely caused by an ATI 
programmer that is sitting on the source that could help you solve it in 
hours rather than weeks?  What exactly can you do to help other than 
shrug your shoulders and tell you to complain at the guys sitting on the 
sources?

-Andy
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