xf86CheckBeta() and friends

[Shane Ley]

Daniel Stone wrote:
>/ On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 02:51:38PM -0500, Keith Packard wrote:
/>/ 
/>>/Around 10 o'clock on Nov 12, Daniel Stone wrote:
/>>/
/>>>/It's bad because we don't want to walk the closed-source route.
/>>/
/>>/While I may agree with you in fact, I disagree with this particular 
/>>/arguement.  It has nothing to do with closed vs open source; the reality 
/>>/is that most people *don't* rebuild X for themselves, and the 'beta' flag 
/>>/provides distributions with a mechanism for encouraging people to get the 
/>>/released version of software instead of continuing to use potentially 
/>>/buggy software.  
/>/ 
/>/ Mmm, but it just has the whole vendor lock-in attitude to mine eyes.  As
/>/ I said to Stuart, I understand the intent, and there's totally valid
/>/ reasoning behind it (it's rather well-intentioned), I just really,
/>/ incredibly, dislike the effects.
/
Certainly any user who has chosen to use a beta version is competent to
make their own mind up about when they wish to upgrade to the next
official version. I'm sure they wouldn't be pushing for support for the
beta version, after the release off the full, and thus I think it would
be silly to consider using this in official Xorg releases.

Given that, I would think that it's silly to keep around code that isn't
being used officially. Perhaps the vendors could maintain their own patches
to include such functionality if it is indeed required outside the main tree.

Regards,
Shane