On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Terry 'Mongoose' Hendrix II wrote: > I told the X people months ago not to force out utah - that's why I'm > pissed off. An overnight upgrade of gtk shouldn't break my x server. I > also think hiding behind the debian stand-by "it's not even supposed to > work" is why packages are always broken - no one cares.
I don't think anyone is saying "it's not even supposed to work"....what I think is the case here is that we're all trying to shake the bugs out of the DRI code using wider-spread testing. Keep in mind that woody will not be released next week, so the transition is actually quite timely and important. We could remain using XF86 v3.3.x forever, but I think that we would hear more about not trying to do the changeover at this point in woody's development. Keep in mind also that, while you may run on ix86, there are MANY of us that don't (I have two sparcs, three alphas, and a mips in my "home lab" that I run Debian on. This version of X using DRI is much improved on at least Alpha and has the potential (really soon now) to compile and run on my Indy sans huge amounts of patching, unlike any other X version prior. Lastly, the "no one cares" argument is rather insulting and, in my experience, will not persuade anyone to look into your problems or respect your opinion about the matter (last time someone insulted me, I just walked away...which, I suspect, is pretty common and civilised human behaviour). I can say, as a maintainer of more than four packages for Debian, WE DO CARE, but you have to allow us time to shake out problems. We've all made mistakes and released things that break "the norm", but that's part of knowing your package, the future roadmap of the packages involved, and the release cycle timing of unstable. I back Branden's decisions to proceed with the upgrade to DRI. He hosted experimental packages on his own for quite some time, hoping that he would get enough people to test them while trying to fix up the monumental packaging requirements of something this size. Whether he got the feedback he needed or not, he made the decision and I think that unstable is better because of it (now I finally have an X server that runs on my V3 in my main Alpha and a much less buggy X server on the other two). Sure, there's going to be some hiccups and problems, hence the neverending "startx is telling me that I'm not allowed to run the X server anymore" threads, but things happen in unstable and sometimes, we just have to weather through them or do what we have to do to suit our specific needs. To end this long reply, I suggest this: compile your own Xserver and utah and install it in /usr/local until things work out to the point where they are usable again for your setup. Running "unstable" means that YMMV, which sounds like an excuse, but it's really the truth and is not meant to discount complaints. Again, things happen, older software sometimes isn't compatible with newer software, etc...either way, the point is, we do care and, if you're looking for stability, stick with potato and just compile the packages from woody that you need yourself until woody is released. C
