On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 13:06 +0000, David Nusinow wrote: > On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 12:27:26PM +0200, Michel Dänzer wrote: > > On Sat, 2006-08-26 at 13:51 +0000, David Nusinow wrote: > > > > > > This was at the request of the release team. Since Nvidia hadn't released > > > a > > > driver for 7.1, and it wasn't clear that they would any time soon, the > > > RM's > > > wanted to allow nvidia-glx users to have an easy way to have acceleration. > > > This was the compromise to allow us to ship 7.1. > > > > You're saying we would have stayed with an older and clearly inferior > > upstream version of free software if we hadn't found a way to deal with > > a flaw in proprietary software? > > I don't know, you'll have to ask Steve, but that was certaintly a real > concern. You know as well as I do that people are going to use the binary > drivers whatever we do. Either way, it was a minor concession. We already > give people plenty of rope to hang themselves with X, adding another switch > isn't going to cause any more issues.
I take it you're volunteering to shoulder some of the potential additional upstream bug triage burden then. > My priority is to support our users as best we can, and if it was a choice > between letting nvidia users hang themselves when they screw up or not > letting i965 owners be unable to run Debian without backports then it was > an incredibly easy choice. Are you seriously arguing that's the only significant upstream improvement in 7.1 vs. 7.0? > > > Now that they've released an updated driver this could potentially be > > > removed, but I still think it's a useful feature > > > > Again, I disagree. I suspect this will lead to spurious bug reports down > > the road. > > > > > (which is why I pushed it upstream too). > > > > Indeed, without any prior discussion. > > I didn't realize I needed to ask for permission for such things. If the > -ignoreABI option didn't already exist, I wouldn't have done so. I didn't > really add anything new, I just provided a new way to get at it. Once the option is in xorg.conf and things work, people will tend to forget about the option even when it's not really needed anymore. Then when the ABI breaks again, that gets ignored, potentially causing all kinds of weird behaviour resulting in spurious bug reports that will waste the time of and potentially confuse bug triagers, unless they add the option to the already too long list of gotchas to watch out for. > On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 01:06:13PM +0000, David Nusinow wrote: > > Also, if you want to remove it from upstream, go ahead, but I'd like > to discuss it first. Ah, so removing it requires discussion, but adding it didn't? > I don't really love the option myself, but it'll very likely be a > patch that we have to carry around for a while in Debian if it doesn't > go upstream. I don't understand why, given that there is a compatible third party release now. Even without that, the Debian packaging of the older releases should have been able to arrange for -ignoreABI getting passed to the X server when necessary. -- Earthling Michel Dänzer | http://tungstengraphics.com Libre software enthusiast | Debian, X and DRI developer
