Re: Re: lack of XFree information as a LOTD stopper

On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 01:23:32AM +0000, Gustavo Homem wrote:
> >
> > One idea I had, was that we should enhance the availablility of new
> > drivers, so that at the install time of major Linux distributions
> > the installer would query over the network if there was an updated
> > drivar available for the graphics card. I think this is what MS
> > windows does, and current technologies with Mandrake urpmi, Redhat
> > up2date and Debian apt-get etc allows this. Of cause - everything needs
> > to get organized and somebody has to do the work...
> 
> I don't think this is too good. It can also break things that were stable and 
> tested in the distro. That kind of automatic procedure is indeed much MsLike, 
> and that sometimes also means problems. It's better if the user looks for an 
> updated driver herself, it she feels the need for that :-), but if it ain't 
> broke, don't fix it, even if there is an upgrade

You may be right, but if we are targetting X for the same user crowd as 
MS Windows, that is just ordinary plain people, they would not know what
to do, and having some system to help them would be great for Linux/X
to bring it to the mass market.

> (ex: I am not updating my mdk 8.2 box, where finally after trying all kinds of 
> drivers my r128 works for Xv, 3D and tv grabbing at the same time...it took 
> me years to have the 3 things workgin and I don't even wanna hear about 
> driver upgrades).

Yes, maybe we should have some reversal facilities in the system, so you
can go back to an earlier version of your system. Modern computers have
enough disk space to allow for this. This is an operating system
faclility tho - not an X facility. MS Windows has this.

> 
> >
> > What could be done is either actively work together with each of the
> > major Linux distribution providers, to get new drivers into their
> > updates stream, or to make our own package availablilty store -
> > benefits of either way of doing it could be investigated.
> 
> If the XFree developers released publicly any driver updates for the latest 
> XFree version, I am sure the distros would package them to the updates 
> sections, at least if they were to fix important stuff. Even without 
> packaging, updating a driver is trivial, so, the point is whether or those 
> updates can be released.

Maybe they will, but I have some experiences with some bugs that I was
involved in, which did not get solved in a nice way by the Linux
distributor. And I maintain a number of things where corrections take a
while to get into the pipe of the updates of major Linux distributors.
I am talking many months. For new graphics drivers some automated fast
central distribution scheme would be a bonus.

best regards
keld