2008/2/10, Travis Willard <travis@archlinux.org>:
Ok guys,
I've been talking to the AMD/ATI guys about getting ArchLinux packages bundled with their catalyst releases, and was told something interesting - apparently, the driver (kernel/Xorg) is independent of the catalyst release, and is still versioned the "old way" - for example, we used to have "fglrx 8.45.4" or whatever, and I changed it to "catalyst YY.MM" when AMD started releasing their linux drivers as 'catalyst'. The thing with this is, there may be special versions of the driver between catalyst releases for certain vendors, for example - so catalyst 8.01 may have driver (fglrx) version 8.45.5, but then they release a special version for laptop X that's 8.45.6, and isn't a catalyst release, as it's geared to the specific laptop's hardware.
So, basically, I jumped the gun renaming fglrx to catalyst, as (in general) it makes more sense to keep versioning it the old way (which, at the time, I thought was going away, and was mistaken).
So, what I'm wondering is, should I re-rename the packages back to fglrx? Leave them catalyst, and ignore any special versions that may, at some point in the future, come out? Re-rename them to something other than 'fglrx' to indicate they're the Radeon Proprietary drivers? I'm not sure how to handle this, and suggestions are more than welcome.
I asked the ATI guys the same thing, and they said they'd prefer to have some 'meta-package' called catalyst that depends on the appropriate fglrx-* packages, which I don't really like, because then the 'catalyst' package is an empty package, used only for the deps it pulls in.
Thoughts?
I don't mind renaming them back to fglrx again. *shrugs* For extra-special versions - I doubt they will ever be in our repo. Meta-package is definetely a bad idea, we've got rid of most of them (except xorg-clients). Does the decission to include Arch support in the official catalyst depends on our packaging scheme? -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)