Bug#674952: xserver-xorg-video-radeon: fails to work properly without -ati

[Maarten Lankhorst]

Hey,

Op 30-05-12 00:30, Yann Dirson schreef:
> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 11:45:45PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
>>> Even then, why this Depends of ati on all 3 drivers ?  I can "dpkg -r
>>> --force-depends" both mach64 and r128, and ati+radeon does startup
>>> without complaining at all.  Shouldn't this be downgraded to a
>>> Recommends as well ?
>> This is very fine for you. What about mach64 and r128 users? Then we'll
>> get reports from people turning off Recommends. The usual fine line,
>> between Depends and Recommends, etc. Depends means being safer.
> Well, as users of other video cards, they will be able to select just
> the driver for their own card, and not eg. radeon.
If you only want to use -radeon, install a custom xorg.conf that references radeon directly.
The X server will pick 'ati' in autodetect mode, which will forward to the correct driver.

>>> The current situation just makes some people (eg. me ;) break the
>>> dependency link that's the weakest to get rid of useless drivers, with
>>> the results described in my original report.
>> What are you gaining?
>> $ for f in $(dpkg -L xserver-xorg-video-r128); do if [ -f $f ]; then ls -lh $f; fi; done|awk '{print $5}'
>> 110K
>> 5.1K
>> 676
>> 6.0K
>> 117K
>> 2.2K
>> 27
>>
>>> If I check the Policy about Depends, "This declares an absolute
>>> dependency", which is clearly not the case here.  Even the official
>>> definition of Recommends makes me wonder if it would not be too
>>> strong.  After all, someone with a radeon is likely to select the
>>> readon driver, then the ati wrapper will be selected as Recommended,
>>> but the latter should IMHO have no reason to pull mach64 and r128,
>>> that would not fit the "packages that would be found together with
>>> this one in all but unusual installations" criteria.
>> The current situation ensures that X works by default. People can still
>> select this or that driver manually as explained previously, so it looks
>> to me like the current relationships are fine (and have been for I think
>> many years).
> At least downgrading to Recommends would keep things working by
> default.  And even downgrading to Suggests, together with -all
> depending on {radeon,r128,mach64}, would keep things working by
> default - while allowing those who don't want extra stuff to avoid
> cruft.
>
The extra cruft of a few 100kb? Make your own xorg.conf and remove ati.
You'll sacrifice auto config but whatever is more important to you. :-)

~Maarten