Re: xserver-xorg-video-via
On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 07:46:44PM +0100, Patrick Schoenfeld wrote:
> Hi Luc,
>
> On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 07:30:19PM +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> >
> > Patrick, there are a few misconceptions here.
>
> Probably you are right. However I'm not involved in openchrome or
> unichrome development, so I can just say what I see from a user
> perspective.
>
> > When the openchrome fork happened, it was deemed upstream that the only
> > acceptable solution was that openchrome maintained the upstream via
> > driver.
>
> Who do you mean by upstream in this case? And why did they deem so?
This was the conclusion of a few at X.org, namely redhats Mike Harris
and Alan Cox, neither actually closely involved in anything X.
> > I wanted -via to disappear there and then already, but this was
> > not deemed an acceptable solution.
>
> And be replace by -unichrome or -openchrome or what? :)
Whatever fits the user best.
> > Also, -unichrome is not dead. I am just overloaded with work on
> > -radeonhd.
>
> Okay I see. But you must commit that 2 years+ not having a release makes
> it look like this for the user.
Iirc, my last release was august 2006. This is 1y and 4-5months. Since
then, there have been rather extensive and far reaching changes to the
driver. And by the time it was getting to the point of stabilisation
i joined SUSE and have been swamped with freeing ATI since.
My git code tends to be rather good and stable though. Much more so than
any release of a competing project.
> BTW. where is the sense in having two
> indepent drivers anyway? Why not join efforts with the openchrome
> project and develop a good driver together with them?
This was their choice. Technically, -unichrome is lightyears ahead, and
even though some of the openchrome people deny this; they are moving in
the direction that i moved in years ago already, and which they rejected
then. Unichrome is where the actual work has happened for years, it is
where the modern modesetting paradigms were pioneered. Even though i do
not support some rather unstable and bling features and i do not support
hardware i cannot test, it is far superior, and was the basis upon which
radeonhd was developed.
> For users its only
> irritating to have 2+ drivers and never really know which one they can
> use. Besides that it makes decision harder for distributors who need to
> choose a driver, too.
This is up to the distributors. They usually know if they need to choose
or what choice to make.
> And their choice has a lot more weight then one
> might see, because users would like to apt-get or zappy or whatelese
> their drivers instead of downloading svn trunks or git repositories. :)
You can git unichrome and then dpkg-buildpackage it, at least you could
6months ago. It doesn't get much easier than that, apart from being
prepackaged already.
Luc Verhaegen.
SUSE/Novell X Driver Developer.
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