This one time, at band camp, Daniel Stone said: > On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 11:21:32PM +0000, Stephen Gran wrote: > > Right, I was talking about having xserver-xorg do it as well. Let me > > rephrase a bit: > > > > I believe the nvidia packages in debian are doing it right now because > > they had to be coinstallable with xserver-xfree86. Since xorg is the > > new kid on the block, so to speak, it can no longer claim "I owned the > > file first", so it is an xorg bug at least partly. > > /me frowns. xserver-xorg is a logical continuation of xserver-xfree86, > and I daresay the userbase of xserver-xorg without proprietary drivers > is much greater than that of xserver-xorg with proprietary drivers. Hmm, I think somehow (late night, beer, whatever), this has gotten at cross purposes. I actually agree with you (that's what the 'at least partly' meant, at any rate). What I was trying to say was that xserver-xfree86 was always the canonical place for the gl libs to live, and it was always other packages job to work around xserver-xfree86 if they needed to divert some of those files. When vorlon said that nvidia-glx was around first, I took that to mean that the argument is something like "xserver-xorg has been packaged after nvidia-glx, and so it can't quite make the same claim xserver-xfree86 could, even though it is a logical extension." This argument is somewhat reasonable - it is the job of the second package to make sure it coexists with extant ones. If I misread vorlon, I'm sorry. That being said, I am not asking you to bend over backwards for every non-free driver out there. I thought that adding a diversion for the gl libs likely to be diverted by other driver packages would be relatively straight forward, and would future proof some of this end of things. Not because I want xorg to make a special effort to play nice with non-free packagees in general (I have no partivular reason to care, in fact, as I don't use any of them, as my last attempt at using the ATI ones were not particularly inspiring), but because it seems like a reasonable thing to do, given that many of them are out there, and people expect to use them in a reasonably hassle free way. > > Additionally, all these proprietary add on drivers that insist on > > providing their own gl libraries usually don't bother with dpkg-divert > > calls (presumably because they are packaged by monkeys at ATI or > > something), so having some of that logic in the xorg packages would be > > helpful in the general case, even if there was no bug in xorg as such. > > Look, I'm no fan of proprietary drivers, but calling the driver people > 'monkeys' is a bit harsh. Especially when they provide RPMs that people > insist on alien'ing for their older drivers, and they now provide an > installer that generates debs, and ... wait for it ... does the right > thing with diversions. > > Which leaves nvidia. And you can call them monkeys for their packages > not working with Debian by default, but only as much as you can call > Debian monkeys for not working with nvidia stuff by default. I don't mean to malign them unfairly. The once or twice I have tried to use the fglrx debs, it has been an unpleasant experience that would require a --force-overwrite to get out of. I am glad to hear they've gotten better. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : sgran@debian.org | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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