On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 08:43:57PM -0400, Jay Berkenbilt wrote: > > > In re-envisioning the X server debconfage for post-sarge, I am considering > > a design along the lines of: > > > > * Dumbing the interaction down to just the setting of parameters. > > * Providing fallback question defaults to address 2). > > * Providing user-invisible templates that "shadow" certain questions, which > > will exist to let autodetection tools poke values into them. > > If my understanding is correct (and yours is probably much better than > mine), XFree86 4.4.0 (yes, I know about the licensing problems) claims > to have an autoconfiguration mechanism, and the X.Org (6.8.1?) forked > off (again) of XFree86 pretty late in the pre 4.4.0 days. I wonder > whether much of this will just disappear when Debian moves to x.org. > (Wishful thinking?) I'm tempted to download Fedora Core 2 or Fedora > Core 3 RC 2 (which are both using x.org) and see what their > configuration stuff looks like. At one point I had believed the X-Oz/XFree86-1.1 license taint had been in the XFree86 X server autoconfiguration code from its first commit to the XFree86 tree, but months later found out I was wrong. The Debian X FAQ still has my wrong understanding in it, and I need to fix that. More to the point, I don't think there is any single magic bullet that will solve the X configuration problem. I look forward to having server autoconfiguration being a tool in the toolbox, though. Hopefully it works out better than XFree86 4.0's "-configure" option, which was notorious for crashing with SIGILLs. My personal foremost goal for the X server configuration process in Debian is: * We damn well better not lock the user's machine. Some people don't see to prioritize the above quite as highly as I do. They'd rather see an install with fewer confirming strokes of the Enter key, or simply don't care about users whose machines lock up, because their own machines don't. But as long as I have influence over the issue, I'm going to uphold the above principle until and unless I am persuaded otherwise. This isn't to imply I've struck the best balance in my work on X configuration to date in Debian; far from it. xserver-xfree86.config.in has grown tremendously warty, and the only person who seems to both understand it and is willing to hack on it is me. That's not really an acceptable state of affairs. This is why I want to make X server maintainer config scripts a little dumber and a lot simpler, as I have written in other messages on this subject. Configuration and auto-configuration are really orthogonal issues. The former is simple, and is about transforming debconf answers into a config file. The latter is about sticking one's fingers into the hardware and having long chains of deductive logic that pick the "best" values for those debconf answers. There are people who seem to have solved the autoconfiguration issue much better than I, or at least taken much more popular stabs at it. I'd like to get xserver-xfree86.config.in out of their way. Poke whatever values you like into the debconf database, and the maintainer scripts will do the rest. Perhaps there will be several X autoconfiguration tools developed -- probably borrowed from various distributions -- and they can duke it out for supremacy and/or the eventual blessing of the debian-installer team. If an autoconfig tool picks the wrong values, or locks up the machine while attempting to figure one out, I can dutifully reassign that bug to the appropriate package, and it won't be cluttering the list of legitimate bugs against X. > > Debian's XFree86 SVN repo is not hosted on alioth (fortunately?). It's > > hosted at necrotic.deadbeast.net. > > > > http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/README.txt > > Yeah, I eventually figured that out ;-) Heh. -- G. Branden Robinson | What cause deserves following if Debian GNU/Linux | its adherents must bury their branden@debian.org | opposition with lies? http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Noel O'Connor
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