Christopher Stone <chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/5/20 Konrad Meyer <konrad@tylerc.org>:

> > As was brought up in a recent thread (of a similarly long and pointless
> > nature), any Fedora user is free to work on getting support for
> > whatever they want into Fedora proper, and popular vote has absolutely
> > *nothing* to do with what actually gets included in Fedora. If you want
> > something done, do it yourself. If you aren't satisfied by numerous
> > explanations, find something that satisfies you more than Fedora. We
> > love having more users, but repeated complaints from leeches are just
> > annoying.

> I'm sure a repo will pop up with all the necessary rpms if nVidia
> doesn't come out with drivers soon enough.


Go ahead an put it up!

> It is just frustrating
> that it has to happen this way. Such a small amount of effort to make
> the distro user friendly for everyone,

It is *not* a small amount of effort. We are not just talking of
recompile-old-X-packages-and-forget, it means an ongoing effort of bug
handling, keeping other packages depending on the old API, ... Plus if this
is done, it is quite probable that nVidia would /never/ see the point of
upgrading their stuff ("Why bother? It works fine with the <nVidia specific
set of packages>"?) And if such is kept up, it would snowball into an
enormous job of keeping whatever backward compatibility dozens of random
hardware and software pieces require. Better go for a long-time-stability
distribution then (but then again, I just saw problems with an oldish
distribution for which they can't get machines it runs on anymore...).

> and yet we must stick to our
> principles and screw the end user.

It is more like Fedora users are its users /because/ Fedora is bleeding
edge, and of its principles; and that means breaking some eggs from time to
time (if I may mix metaphors). If that doesn't apeal to you, you aren't the
kind of user Fedora is aimed at. Can't please everyone, sorry about that.
Just shop elsewhere.

> It doesn't make sense.

It makes perfect sense to me.

[Full disclosure: I'm an nVidia user myself, and 3d has /never/ worked
here (had enough grief with the binary driver that I gave up on it long
ago). But for my needs, the current nv driver is plenty enough. YMMV.]

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Les Mikesell wrote:

Adam Jackson wrote:



I don't have a problem with Xorg taking any amount of time they want.
The problem is in fedora shipping a pre-release - or perhaps even more
so in their claim of knowing that the ABI is finalized before it is in
fact published as a standard.

I suggest you complain to the xorg 1.5 release engineer the Fedora
xorg maintainer is not coordinating with him closely. And then that
you follow the advice of the xorg 1.5 release engineer on this issue.


You know I'm both, right?

- ajax


I assume that was an attempt at humor.... But, it makes it hard to
claim that you didn't have some inside information about when the
interface was going to stop changing. In another company that sort of
thing might be called anti-competitive behavior.


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Guys let's stop using the argument "they didn't know it was stable"...
If You're writing a driver for Your product and not just an ordinary
userspace thing, but a driver half of which sits in the kernel and the
other half in X, You'll HAVE TO have a guy (or maybe many more) who will
be doing just that and nothing else.
And I bet if someone's job is writing an Xorg driver, he would at least
be signed to the -devel mailing list and would checkout from
CVS/SVN/GIT/... at least once a week to watch where the development is.
And don't tell that's not the case with Windows. Of course it isn't...
But we aren't talking about a windows programmer who is writing Xorg
driver as a hobby in the first time in his life and doesn't know that
ABI's aren't very loved in FOSS world. We are speaking about a *nix
programmer.

I myself have an Nvidia card in my home PC (and one at work).
And because I want to be able to do OpenGL (accelerated) I just excluded
xorg stuff from yum upgrade. I'll have to wait for the driver from
NVidia. Mea culpa (for buying NVidia.. next one will be AMD), not
Fedora's (for shipping "unstable" ABI).


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Horst H. von Brand wrote:

Christopher Stone <chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:

2008/5/20 Konrad Meyer <konrad@tylerc.org>:



As was brought up in a recent thread (of a similarly long and pointless
nature), any Fedora user is free to work on getting support for
whatever they want into Fedora proper, and popular vote has absolutely
*nothing* to do with what actually gets included in Fedora. If you want
something done, do it yourself. If you aren't satisfied by numerous
explanations, find something that satisfies you more than Fedora. We
love having more users, but repeated complaints from leeches are just
annoying.



I'm sure a repo will pop up with all the necessary rpms if nVidia
doesn't come out with drivers soon enough.



Go ahead an put it up!


It is just frustrating
that it has to happen this way. Such a small amount of effort to make
the distro user friendly for everyone,


It is *not* a small amount of effort. We are not just talking of
recompile-old-X-packages-and-forget, it means an ongoing effort of bug
handling, keeping other packages depending on the old API, ... Plus if this
is done, it is quite probable that nVidia would /never/ see the point of
upgrading their stuff ("Why bother? It works fine with the <nVidia specific
set of packages>"?) And if such is kept up, it would snowball into an
enormous job of keeping whatever backward compatibility dozens of random
hardware and software pieces require. Better go for a long-time-stability
distribution then (but then again, I just saw problems with an oldish
distribution for which they can't get machines it runs on anymore...).



Windows??? anyone??


and yet we must stick to our
principles and screw the end user.


It is more like Fedora users are its users /because/ Fedora is bleeding
edge, and of its principles; and that means breaking some eggs from time to
time (if I may mix metaphors). If that doesn't apeal to you, you aren't the
kind of user Fedora is aimed at. Can't please everyone, sorry about that.
Just shop elsewhere.


+1

Stable (in the meaning of not-changing) and new sometimes arent't
compatible.

If You want stable (read: slower-changing) try the Enterprise versions.
Or Debian (2.6.18 *is* stable but it lacks the new functionality added
during last 1.5 years).





It doesn't make sense.


It makes perfect sense to me.

[Full disclosure: I'm an nVidia user myself, and 3d has /never/ worked
here (had enough grief with the binary driver that I gave up on it long
ago). But for my needs, the current nv driver is plenty enough. YMMV.]



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Suren Karapetyan wrote:


I assume that was an attempt at humor.... But, it makes it hard to
claim that you didn't have some inside information about when the
interface was going to stop changing. In another company that sort of
thing might be called anti-competitive behavior.




Guys let's stop using the argument "they didn't know it was stable"...
If You're writing a driver for Your product and not just an ordinary
userspace thing, but a driver half of which sits in the kernel and the
other half in X, You'll HAVE TO have a guy (or maybe many more) who will
be doing just that and nothing else.


Yes... But this may not be the guy that decides when an officially
supported driver is announced and released.


And I bet if someone's job is writing an Xorg driver, he would at least
be signed to the -devel mailing list and would checkout from
CVS/SVN/GIT/... at least once a week to watch where the development is.


Yes, so if someone mentioned that it was maybe, probably stable a week
ago without being prepared to call it a release, you might expect said
programmer to have noticed by now, but it hardly seems fair to expect
him or his company to commit to a release at that point either.


And don't tell that's not the case with Windows. Of course it isn't...
But we aren't talking about a windows programmer who is writing Xorg
driver as a hobby in the first time in his life and doesn't know that
ABI's aren't very loved in FOSS world. We are speaking about a *nix
programmer.


*nix doesn't have much to do with refusing to standardize interfaces,
that's exclusively Linus's territory. I think we'll see something
different when Red Hat does their release.


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Les Mikesell wrote:

Suren Karapetyan wrote:


I assume that was an attempt at humor.... But, it makes it hard to
claim that you didn't have some inside information about when the
interface was going to stop changing. In another company that sort
of thing might be called anti-competitive behavior.




Guys let's stop using the argument "they didn't know it was stable"...
If You're writing a driver for Your product and not just an ordinary
userspace thing, but a driver half of which sits in the kernel and the
other half in X, You'll HAVE TO have a guy (or maybe many more) who
will be doing just that and nothing else.


Yes... But this may not be the guy that decides when an officially
supported driver is announced and released.


Yep... You're right. And the guy who decides will most likely also say:
"How many people use that X *thing*? Less then 1000? There is no way
I'll pay for writing the driver for it."




And I bet if someone's job is writing an Xorg driver, he would at
least be signed to the -devel mailing list and would checkout from
CVS/SVN/GIT/... at least once a week to watch where the development is.


Yes, so if someone mentioned that it was maybe, probably stable a week
ago without being prepared to call it a release, you might expect said
programmer to have noticed by now, but it hardly seems fair to expect
him or his company to commit to a release at that point either.


It may not be true for his company, but it does make sense for him.
The point is if the ABI seems to be stable but changes after a week, I
wouldn't expect it to change much.
And if I was THE programmer and I knew that after a month or so I'll be
ordered to write a driver for the new version of Xorg, I would start
thinking (read: compile-debug, compile-debug,...) about it as soon as
the ABI *seemed* to be stable.




And don't tell that's not the case with Windows. Of course it isn't...
But we aren't talking about a windows programmer who is writing Xorg
driver as a hobby in the first time in his life and doesn't know that
ABI's aren't very loved in FOSS world. We are speaking about a *nix
programmer.


*nix doesn't have much to do with refusing to standardize interfaces,
that's exclusively Linus's territory. I think we'll see something
different when Red Hat does their release.




I wasn't talking about *nix. I was talking about FOSS.
And it isn't about "standardize interfaces", it's about stable ABI.
Enterprise software vendors have the problem of having to support old
versions of their software, even if they don't want. That's the reason
of the old LM password hashes from Windows 95 till Vista, and the old
LinuxThreads compatibility library in RHEL. This isn't true for FOSS
developers. They don't have to be a "hostage" of the software they write.

Nothing limits the speed of changes in FOSS software.
That's why if a FOSS project sees even a small benefit from breaking the
ABI, it won't usually think twice.


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On May 21, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@gmail.com> wrote:

> Adam Jackson wrote:
>>
>>>> I don't have a problem with Xorg taking any amount of time they want.
>>>> The problem is in fedora shipping a pre-release - or perhaps even more
>>>> so in their claim of knowing that the ABI is finalized before it is in
>>>> fact published as a standard.
>>> I suggest you complain to the xorg 1.5 release engineer the Fedora
>>> xorg maintainer is not coordinating with him closely. And then that
>>> you follow the advice of the xorg 1.5 release engineer on this issue.
>>
>> You know I'm both, right?
>>
>> - ajax

> I assume that was an attempt at humor.... But, it makes it hard to
> claim that you didn't have some inside information about when the
> interface was going to stop changing. In another company that sort of
> thing might be called anti-competitive behavior.

People have already quoted the public statements from Xorg that the
ABI was stable, and nVidia's statements that their release cycle has
nothing to do with Xorg's release cycle. nVidia just doesn't care.
Why do you?

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Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@gmail.com> wrote:
> Bill Crawford wrote:

> >> What is it that would suggest that it is finalized to a manager that might
> >> want to commit resources to writing a driver his company will have to
> >> support?

> > So why should "Fedora" commit to supporting "binary driver Foo"
> > before their release is ready?

> That has nothing to do with what I said. I'm suggesting that fedora
> should ship with interfaces that are publicized as standard,

Check. This is the API for 1.5.

> and allow
> time for changes in this standard to propagate before shipping
> something different from the standard.

Check. Changes had been widely announced, previews shipped in rawhide and
prereleases.

> This has nothing to do with
> supporting anything or anyone. It is common decency in interaction.

Yep. nVidia is extremely rude in not following the lead, given that
everybody else is working in the open. Heck, when a new Windows ships, they
/are/ ready for it, even though everybody is carefully kept in the dark.
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Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:

Denis Leroy wrote:

Jason Tang wrote:

The only problem being that this release is incompatible with current
nvidia drivers. Granted, I'm aware of the Fedora position regarding
non-OSS, but this Xorg issue has completely destroyed many user's
confidence in the dev team.


That's nothing new you know. Out of the 9 fedora releases, I think at
least 8 out of 9 didn't work with the Nvidia driver at release time.
however Nvidia is usually pretty good at playing catch up.


I'm also hostage to Nvidia's good will for my Lenovo T61's Quadro
chipset, and can't upgrade to F-9 until their next release (nv doesn't
work at all on this chipset). I wouldn't go back to a Radeon chipset
though, not until we have a working free equivalent (emphasis on
'working') to nvidia-settings for easy dual-head support... The good
news is that with xrandr maturing, we're probably almost there.



Interesting...

I have no "nv" problems on my Lenovo T61p with Quadro FX570M.
Running with no xorg.conf. ...
http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_1536ec85-61c8-49d4-aeaa-3852a20d5d29


Hmm, mine is a NVS 140M. nv yields a black screen. Even if nv worked,
it's unbearably slow and can't handle dual 1680x1050 screens. But I
would never criticize the Xorg developers, the only culprit for nv being
so bad is NVidia itself...


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On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 19:06 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> Denis Leroy wrote:
> >
> Interesting...
>
> I have no "nv" problems on my Lenovo T61p with Quadro FX570M.
> Running with no xorg.conf. ...
> http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_1536ec85-61c8-49d4-aeaa-3852a20d5d29
>
> ( Of course 3D aint working but who's using it anyway and certainly 50%
> of Fedora's users as some claim )

Does suspend/resume and hibernate/resume work? Suspend was disabled in
nv in F8 (even though it worked in vesa with appropriate quirks).

>
> JB. ...
>
>
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Les Mikesell <lesmikesell <at> gmail.com> writes:
> > So, this is now irrelevant for
> > the discussion (because it does not materially change the outcome of
> > the drivers not being ready at F9 release time).
>
> I don't think anyone can support that claim, given Nvida's public
> statement that they would target the X release.

You don't seem to get that all this talk about prereleases on their part is
just a lame excuse, they didn't behave any differently in the past when what
Fedora released was an official X.Org X11 release. The only thing you can
possibly fault Fedora and/or X.Org for in this situation is having given NVidia
a convenient excuse for their incompetence, laziness, greediness or whatever
you want to call it.

Kevin Kofler

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