On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 15:19:03 +0100, Pedro Ribeiro wrote: > I'm not asking because I want the latest and greatest driver on Debian > (in case of the intel driver, you can hardly say the greatest...) > > As you might be aware, Intel recently launched a new platform for the > core iX. This platform includes a new integrated graphics card, Intel > HD. > > The drivers before 2.10 have at best flakey support for this card, as > any kernel < 2.6.33. The Debian kernel team is considering using > 2.6.32 patched with a new drm tree which includes the support for > Intel HD, so that solves one end of the problem (see > http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2010/02/msg00727.html ). > Not just considering. The sid kernel has newer drm. > It would be great if the upcoming Squeeze would support this platform > properly - all new laptops are using it and this would provide some > sort of future proof for the stable version! > > This is a tricky decision for you, because forcing users to switch to > KMS is not very nice... but I believe in the end this is better, > because upstream does not support UMS anymore, which would make your > life difficult for bug handling. In other words, the number of bugs > would rise sharply as you force users to switch to KMS, but hopefully > will come down with time and pay off over the support years of stable. > So basically you're saying 2.10 or 2.11 fixed some bugs. Which is all well and good, but then why not go with 2.12 in three months, because it will fix a couple of bugs introduced in 2.11. And introduce 10(?) new regressions. There will always be reasons to go with a newer release. We have the choice between a somewhat known quantity (2.9.x), where we can fix individual bugs that get reported, or going with the newer 2.10 or 2.11, which would bring a few bugfixes, and an unknown number of unknown regressions (and have less time to discover and fix those regressions). My opinion is it's too late for that. This might be different if we knew upstream were very careful to avoid regressions, and/or if there was a major feature that we absolutely want in squeeze and that was too hard to backport, and/or if we had a lot more resources for QA, testing and bug fixing, and/or if we knew 2.9 was majorly screwed, or something like that, but as far as I know none of these possible reasons are there (feel free to point out where I'm wrong). If there are particular bugs in 2.9 that you know are fixed in 2.10 or 2.11, then file bugs, point us at those commits, and we can consider cherry-picking that. Cheers, Julien
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