A couple of people on a recent thread in debian-devel linked to a message I recently posted on Slashdot on this subject. I had thought about posting this information to Debian's lists as well, but at the time, didn't see a need. Thanks to that recent thread, now I see a need. :) Well, I myself am not exactly thrilled that woody won't have 4.2 in it, but: As you said, I've been busy with getting 4.1.x stable. For Debian, this means much more than it does for some vendors. In woody, we support 11 architectures: alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, and sparc. For how many of these machine architectures do Slackware, Mandrake, or Red Hat have 4.1.x, let alone 4.2, available? XFree86 themselves don't test or prepare distribution tarballs for several of these architectures. Debian is the de facto portability laboratory for XFree86 on Linux. Sure, I'll grant you that a lot of people, the kinds with the overclocked Pentium 4's and the latest GeForce card, really don't care about portability, or supporting architectures they've never heard of. But portability is important to me and it's important to Debian. I refuse to treat non-i386 users like second-class citizens. Those who want CVS HEAD, are best advised to learn how to check it out and type "make World". I'm sure that Pentium 4 overlocked to 3 GHz will compile the X source tree pretty quickly. :-) The single most amazing thing about all the hate mail I've received for not having 4.2 Debian packages ready -- aside from the fact that I started receiving it about two days after it was tagged upstream -- is that people seem to be laboring under the delusion that I have some kind of secret tools locked away in a vault, and that I am the only person who has the power to create packages. Sure, I'm probably better at doing XFree86 debs than most people, since I've been doing it for so long, but there's no great secret. I'm sure that with half an hour of manpage reading, a reasonably intelligent person can learn everything he needs to produce XFree86 4.2 debs for himself that will work well enough to satisfy his impatient self. Hey, I like to see the latest and greatest of everything, too -- that's why I use apt-listchanges, but I don't go haranguing the Debian developers to package up a new upstream version when I can clearly tell that they're working on other things for the project. On a related note, 4.2 just plain won't work on some of Debian's supported machines because we need the PCI Domain support, which is currently a branch in XFree86 CVS and did not make it into the 4.2 release. So for us, releasing 4.2 doesn't just mean releasing 4.2. It means releasing 4.2 plus some very large patches in very critical parts of the server code. You really, really want a good long opportunity to shake that sort of thing out, since Debian's 4.2 may not behave exactly as XFree86's 4.2 does. I don't just package the thing tagged xf-4_2_0 and leave it at that. I track hotfixes commited both to the latest release's branch and to HEAD, and incorporate them into Debian's packages if they work and if they make the packages better from a quality standpoint. Ask ATI video card users about 4.2.0 and "composite sync" sometime. (This isn't to dog the XFree86 Project. Software has bugs. Software releases with bugs. But, knowing about the default composite sync issue which affects so many users, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it.) I didn't expect it to take until May for woody to release. Back in January, I felt sure that there was no way Anthony Towns would accept 4.2 into woody; when I sounded him out at the time about it he sounded kind of skeptical. Needless to say, the longer it takes woody to release, the worse a decision this is, but I don't have control over the release process. (Strictly speaking, Anthony doesn't either -- meaning, he can declare a release, sure, but he can't force people at gunpoint to fix the remaining release critical bugs. And Debian's philosophy has been to release when "it's ready", not when some marketroid tells us to, and thus just live with whatever whopper bugs happen to be in the release that day.) So, that's why XFree86 4.2 isn't in woody. I'll also add that some of my time (some of it paid for by my employer) has being going towards trying to solve a problem that people have been complaining about even more loudly -- and for a greater duration -- than the absence of XFree86 4.2 Debian packages: Debian's installer. Some people just don't like Debian's existing text-mode installer, no matter how flexible it is. They want a GUI installer, darn it. Progeny's version of Debian got pretty positive reviews, and several people said Progeny "solved" the "problem" with Debian's installer. Thus, a vastly improved version of Progeny's installer is now available. You can read about it at: http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/ PGI is not yet at 1.0, but has performed dozens (perhaps hundreds, by now) of successful woody installations on i386 and ia64 hardware. If you use either of these platforms, please check it out. Additionally, thanks to Jimmy Kaplowitz a PowerPC port is underway. I'm looking forward to the day when I can perform a PGI install using XFree86 4.2. (So are S3 Trio64 users, IBM Thinkpad T21 users, etc.) Both projects are important to me. -- G. Branden Robinson | I've made up my mind. Don't try to Debian GNU/Linux | confuse me with the facts. branden@debian.org | -- Indiana Senator Earl Landgrebe http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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