Re: X Strike Force X.Org X11 SVN commit: r2912 - in branches/7.1/xserver/xorg-server/debian: . patches
On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 09:26 +0000, David Nusinow wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 12:13:09PM +0200, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 21:14 +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
>
> > Ignoring an incompatible ABI doesn't cause problems with proprietary
> > drivers only. Keep in mind that bad xorg.conf settings tend to spread
> > like viruses, e.g. we still have to regularly educate people about the
> > braindeadness of enabling backing store or disabling certain extensions
> > in a SubSection "extmod", because these happened to be in some example
> > xorg.conf sometime at the end of last millennium.
>
> That's true, but any sort of modification to things will spread like this.
> The same would have been true if people modified their startx, and it would
> have been far more difficult to catch. If we provide the option, we need to
> be able to deal with it. I wouldn't mind ripping out -ignoreABI all
> together myself.
But nothing like that should be necessary. The nvidia-glx package should
have been perfectly capable of dealing with the issue. I just fail to
see how this is even remotely our problem.
> > > and the release team apparently explicitly requested IgnoreABI as a
> > > prerequisite for supporting 7.1, which I think we can all agree is
> > > a very worthwhile end. If you want to take the release team to task
> > > for implicitly supporting binary drivers, I don't think anyone would
> > > begrudge you.
> >
> > I am indeed quite irritated that making it *convenient* to use
> > proprietary drivers (people seem to have managed in the last couple of
> > months since the 7.1 release after all) seems to be considered so
> > important as to risk a long term negative impact for free software.
>
> I didn't like it either (see Steve's mail) but we have to face the reality
> that people will use such drivers right now, and if we prevent them from
> doing so actively then they'll go elsewhere.
Again, I think there's a huge difference between not making it
convenient and 'preventing' it. At some point, providers and users of
proprietary drivers have to bear the consequences of their decisions,
but for some reason we seem to feel obliged to bear them for them
instead.
I still feel the subtle difference between a command line switch and an
xorg.conf option doesn't get the appropriate appreciation, but I'm
afraid I can't come up with better arguments. :(
--
Earthling Michel Dänzer | http://tungstengraphics.com
Libre software enthusiast | Debian, X and DRI developer
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