[arch-general] Tobias Powalowski and his nonsensical maintenance decisions

[Eric Blau]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 2:19 PM, Carsten Mattner
<carstenmattner at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 5:11 PM, Eric Blau <eblau at eblau.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carsten Mattner via arch-general
>> <arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:
>>
>> There's a fix that's been submitted to the tip, but no effort has
>> been made to patch the bug in the 4.10.x stable series. It seems the
>> devs don't care about having a stable kernel to use, only about
>> moving forward the tip and staying on the bleeding edge. Shouldn't
>> at least showstopper kernel panics be patched to the "stable"
>> release?
>>
>> I requested a fix on the tip to be patched in the 4.9.x stable
>> series a couple months ago because I tested the fix myself and
>> verified it "worked for me" but it was subsequently reverted. I'm
>> sure I don't know enough about the i915 driver to be able to make
>> these types of decisions about what should or should not be patched
>> other than to help with testing, but it would be nice if the i915
>> dev team made an effort to propagate fixes to stable as well.
>
> It's possible that the fix causes other issues, but I've also seen
> crash fixes take very long until landing in a stable release,
> sometimes taking 2 or 3 releases, while refactorings are intertwined
> with other fixes in stable releases. It looks odd.

Yes, agreed here. The fix I requested to be patched to 4.9.x when it
was the stable release back in the Feb/March timeframe was from
September 2016 but still hadn't made it into a stable release 5 or 6
months later.

> I wonder how the situation is with AMD and nVidia GPUs with open and
> closed driver stacks.

I don't have these problems with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 on my desktop machine.

> It seems that if you run GNOME3 with GTK3 under Wayland and only GTK3
> apps with GDK_BACKEND=wayland and no X app, then it works well, but
> that's like forcing everyone to use just Android apps under ChromeOS.
>
> With libweston and libweston-desktop and further fixes in Xwayland,
> maybe 2018 we will finally have what Wayland promised very long ago. I
> wouldn't blame outsiders if they looked at Linux Desktop and thought
> that there's too many variants and too much change with little
> stabilization going on.

A big reason why Linux Desktop seems like a lost cause.

> Then there's outstandingly stable software like GNU Emacs, FVWM, xterm
> or XMonad. Your config from a decade or two ago still works and with
> minimal to none deprecation disruption.

I prefer stable software that lets me get my job done like i3, vim,
etc. I rarely have problems running the latest versions included in
Arch. The kernel is another story altogether. I frequently have to
switch between linux and linux-lts or build my own kernel with various
patches in order for my machines to run stable.

> So when it comes to open source video driver stacks, the best stragey
> is running one of the last two generations of GPU (Broadwell and
> Skylake) and always stay in thet range since older GPUs lose QA
> coverage with new GPUs coming out. If the capabilities of a GPU are
> clear and you cannot expect to have newer OpenGL support in a newer
> Mesa, then it would make sense to have a stable but old i915 stack for
> old GPUs that doesn't change vs new i915 stack for newer GPUs, but
> Linux is a monolithic design without driver ABIs for good reasons that
> show their disadvantage when QA is insufficient.

My 2015 Broadwell-based MacBook Pro is not that old, yet I have i915
issues with it almost kernel release.

-Eric