Around 6 o'clock on Apr 5, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto wrote: > Do we have any contanct with them? would it be wise to ask the status of > their project and perhaps start to work a bit closer?
Yes, I have reasonably regular contact with a couple of their developers. I'm not sure what the status of their test lab is; last I heard they were working on getting funding, so it's clearly not there yet. I don't know what kinds of pressure they'll have to pick a particular distribution for their test systems. Linux is heavily used in the motion picture industry, and ATI is a large part of that, so I suspect they'll want to test drivers on the same platform their major customers are using. But, if we can manage to get Debian, Red Hat and SuSE shipping more-or-less the same bits, then we should be able to push bug reports from Debian back to ATI and have them reproducible on whatever system they are running. > Do you have any suggestion on how we could simply this process? Like for > eg. sending them some sort of pre-release that they can test... Hmm. Ideally, we'd test our driver interfaces "completely" and so would ATI, so the number of bugs specific to our system would be very small. Keeping very careful track of ABI changes would go a long ways in this direction. I wonder if we couldn't develop some kind of automatic ABI validation system that would scream any time the driver ABI changed. Hmm. ATI has been building and testing drivers against XFree86 4.4 release candiates for several months, so they're clearly interested in making sure their drivers are ready for new X versions. Reducing the downstream changes that Debian makes to X bits would make that effort more valuable for our users. -keith
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