X server 1.9 release thoughts

[Dave Airlie]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 4:24 AM, Alan Coopersmith
<alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
> Alex Deucher wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
>>> It's a numbers game. How many contributors and testers will I lose or gain
>>> compared to the hours of work spent? Until the server is a lot easier to
>>> build from scratch, I think the numbers aren't in my favour yet.
>>
>> I agree with this sentiment for video drivers right now as well.
>
> From the distro builder point of view, when a new graphics chipset is
> released, I'm much more likely to take an individual driver update back
> to a LTS/enterprise support branch than take an entire new X server
> version back, especially if that requires protocol updates that might
> also trigger client library updates.
>
> (At least that's my point of view for Solaris 10 - I can't claim to have
>  polled the people responsible for RHEL, SLED, Ubuntu LTS or any other
>  enterprise release, but would be interested to see their thoughts.)

I've found this mostly to be a false economy, as unless you do a lot of QA, you
are essentially running an untested combo. I know for -ati every
backport requires
revalidating as e.g. RHEL5 has no useful exa in the server, so suddenly you are
using XAA/shadowfb codepaths nobody has tested.

We ended up backporting all of xrandr core in our server instead of each driver.

Dave.