Greetings Jake, * J. R. Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [001113 23:49]: > There were three parts to my message, and you responded to whether or not > support for my card is in active development (apparently there is not, as > I read all the cvs commits, thank you,) but I'm also concerned about what > I can expect in the future.
True enough, I only answered about current support, because that it is I know. I'm not entirely sure what you want from Branden wrt to "legacy card" comments. The clear majority of what is supported in 3.3.x but not in 4.0.x *are* legacy cards. To expect Branden to know that the Savage 4 is not supported in 4.0 and have him make an exception in every reference he makes to differences between 3.3.x and 4.0.x is going a bit far. As for 'expect in the future', that sounds rather like you are used to dealing with corporations, where you give them money and they give you goods or services. This is very different from that situation. If you were, for instance, giving someone money to write a driver for the savage 4, then I would understand your concern. However, as it stands, and as far as I know, you haven't contributed to the progress of XFree86, and thus are not in a position to be expecting anything in the future. > What are XF future plans now? I'm not asking for dates, but rather an > outline to show what is to come. (for example, are there to be more phases > of releases, and if so, are there certain manufacturers and models of > cards to be supported, and if so, approximate timelines, ...) I suppose it depends entirely on what cards the developers have access to, and what the developers want to support. Support may be lacking if S3 did not make programming documentation available. Or, if not many of the X driver authors don't have the card nor want the card, the driver may be some time in the coming. One thing I think you may be forgetting is that the XFree86 developers, much like the kernel team, or the debian developers, do what they do because they get a kick out of it. If trying to program for a card that has lousy vendor support doesn't sound like fun, the driver authors aren't going to buy cards from those vendors, and therefore won't bother to program support. Traditionally, s3 has been good about helping driver authors. However, that may have changed with the Savage 4 chip. It might not hurt to email Diamond/S3/SONICblue/Videocardvendor and ask them if they have supplied the XFree86 team with the needed documentation and possibly some gratis cards. Honestly, if it matters this much to you, you will do what you can to get more cards like yours into the hands of the developers, and perhaps even give the developer a reason to write the driver. $$$ works wonders. I have seen more than a few .signatures from people suggesting they will write drivers for any hardware for a fee. > Finally, I hope Branden realizes there are many non-legacy cards that are > not supported by XF4.0x. Usually people attack Branden with great fervor > on -devel, so I'm not sure how he got away with that comment. To put a > numbers on it, there were many millions of my card produced, and 250MHz, > 32MB, AGP2.1X is anything but legacy. (As a smartass response, there are millions of copies of Windoes95 sold, with pre-emptive multitasking and 32-bit address space/driver support, built-in tcp/ip networking, web browser, and multimedia viewer. And yet, it is very legacy.) http://lists.suse.com/archives/suse-linux-e/2000-Jul/0466.html suggests two possible alternatives you may be amenable to. Frankly Jake, I just don't know what you were expecting to get by emailing Branden. Sure, he can wear his XFree86-guy hat when it suits him (re: XtMakeGeometry or whatnot), but wanting him to magically produce a timeline for a set of drivers that doesn't exist yet (I'm taking your word on this about the CVS commits) while simultaneously wanting an apology because he may have offended your video card seems to be very counterproductive. On another note -- since the original question really had nothing to do with the Debianization of the XFree86 packages, shouldn't the question have been directed to newbie@xfree86.org, xpert@xfree86.org, or perhaps some X newsgroups? You are asking questions that few people will know the answer, assuming an easy answer is available. Try searching the xpert and newbie lists. If there aren't any pointers in those archives, try to contact one of these guys -- listed as authors of the s3virge support, and perhaps the most likely of anyone to bother implementing support for the savage line of cards: Kevin Brosius, Matt Grossman, Harald Koenig, Sebastien Marineau, Mark Vojkovich. Cheers. -- ``Oh Lord; Ooh you are so big; So absolutely huge; Gosh we're all really impressed down here, I can tell you.''
