[arch-dev-public] X.Org 7.3 pre-release testing repo

[Jan de Groot]

On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 22:57 +0200, Alexander Baldeck wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> after reading a thread on the forums where a user posted that with 
> -ignoreABI as a startup flag he could get the nvidia drivers working 
> again, I had a second look.
> 
> It seems that nvidia 100.14.11-4 works with this workaround and I would 
> expect nvidia to react to feature requests in the future - whenever that 
> will be. Yet, I do see serious problems with us keeping the support for 
> the legacy drivers enabled, as for me it sounds very unlikely that 
> nvidia will touch the old drivers ever again. So just to get a 
> discussion going about how to handle this I would raise a question.
> 
> Assuming nvidia doesn't fix their 71xx & 96xx series, will we either:
> 
> * feel forced to drop support for old cards or
> * will we have multiple xorg versions in our repositories?
> 
> Both "solutions" sound very bad to me...

Well, I was thinking the same thing for Xorg 7.1/7.2 when Nvidia had
these legacy drivers around. While I was updating things, I assumed
nvidia would drop legacy support. In fact, they made a new release of
the 71xx legacy drivers with Xorg 7.1/7.2 support. I see more problems
with fglrx though, as ATi has never been good with drivers and new
technology (neither new X servers, neither new ATI cards are supported
completely).
IMHO we should not hold up development because of non-free programs. The
IgnoreABI thing is something that "works", just like that harmless patch
I added to GTK2 to get flashplayer working without assertions on Opera
and Konqueror.