[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Xorg changes / DRM modules

[Heiko Baums]

Writing again to arch-general because of write permissions.

Am Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:21:03 +0100
schrieb Andreas Radke <a.radke at arcor.de>:

> The sad part is that we leave all people with modern Ati cards in the
> dark until upstream declares their code as stable. This will make them
> going back to software rasterizer and either force them to use the
> closed source driver or use weird self made git packages from AUR.

Doesn't matter. A stable running system is better than new features
which don't work yet, lead to regular crashes and make a system
unusable.

Some people need a stable system for working and need to trust in the
stable repos.

> Because I'm also affected with my weird X200m card I'm still looking
> for a good solution how to offer a good set of binary packages people
> can use to try modern code. I could do this on my own like all other
> people from AUR but we could also setup an additional unstable repo at
> Gerolde. I could do this also in my public dir. I'd prefer to have
> people using one set of codebase for reporting bugs upstream. What do
> you think?

Aren't there already git versions for these packages in AUR? If you
want to provide binary packages for them you could just move them to
community or extra. But keep the names e.g. mesa-git, libdrm-git etc.
and add a provides and conflicts variable to the PKGBUILDs (e.g.
provides=libdrm and conflicts=libdrm).

And by default (e.g. with pacman -S xorg) the stable packages are
installed and if someone wants to test the unstable packages he can
simply install the git packages. You could also add a new group
xorg-git.

In this case there should also a conflicts variable be added to the
PKGBUILDs of the stable packages (conflicts=libdrm-git).

I think with this solution everyone could be happy, people who need a
stable system and people who want to test the latest unstable versions.
And it has the advantage that people can easily switch between the
stable and the unstable packages depending on how those packages work.

When the new features go into the stable upstream packages the git
versions could simply be removed from the repos.

Greetings,
Heiko