Daniel Stone

(who maintains the Ubuntu xorg package) replied to my previous posting about xorg.

I wanted to point out that I like his packages very much (they work just fine on Debian, too) and I certainly honor developments in xorg (that is why I use it, after all).

The bug report I mentioned (which was indeed only opened today) is probably more an example for a very different thing: People don’t like entering bugs in bugzilla (me neither. I hate having to open account before being able to report a bug, usually I won’t then and leave that to someone else. Or report it in Debian bugtracking, which actually is kind of unfair to the maintainers)

In fact, I’ve encountered this bug weeks ago. And that is quite shortly after it was introduced then. On christmas eve, I asked in #ubuntu in Freenet, if anyone could reproduce it and it took me 1 second to find someone with the same hardware setup, and him about 20 seconds to lose his IRC connection by trying to reproduce it.

Having a bug go unnoticed in Bugtracking, even if most major distributions run xorg is maybe due to it being new in the latest RC, and them running a different xorg version. Speaks even more for a long stabilization phase, maybe with a separate tree.

Having support for all the shiny new hardware is nice, of course. But all those screaming for xorg in IRC channels, just to be able to try out the visual effects such as real transparency or shadows really suck. Not those preparing or not yet preparing the packages.

If we weren’t stuck in the “we might be going to release soon if something magical happens” phase, I would also appreciate xorg being uploaded to unstable, sure. And I see nothing wrong with xorg in hoary. But xorg right now could show a bad choice for sarge. With the current stable and update policies of course.

As for the drivers, we should really consider a way to do much shorter release cycles, or putting xfree into some (desktop-) “volatile” repository. (For those not aware of volatile, please follow that link. It’s an intiative to have a repository for fast-moving packages, especially like virus, spam and security scanners.)

P.S. sorry for the misspelling of Ubuntu.