On 10/09/2009 12:19 AM, Dave Airlie wrote:
On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 09:37 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 14:05 +0100, Terry Barnaby wrote:
No, I don't what to force testing on anyone (although F11 has done
that
already :) )
I was just suggesting that a separate yum archive with the packages
necessary
to test the later graphics development code that will be in F12 could
be
made available for people to try out easily with their F11 systems.
They can optionally try these. I think it will allow 3D to work for
many people
(from my experience of the latest GIT versions) although others would
not be so
lucky. They can easily back these changes out if they have more issues
than
the standard graphics system.
Then please feel free to make one. :) I don't mean that in a snide
fashion, but it really is the answer. As noted, having our X.org
developers spend time on such a repository directly subtracts that
amount of time from the time they would otherwise spend actually
developing the drivers (our X.org maintainers are also major upstream
developers) and fixing reported bugs.
I thought about doing something like this the other day, but really
if we had something like Ubuntu PPA, which I think is on the longterm
plans for Fedora then it would be a lot easier to do.
At the moment its just too distracting to do.
The thing with doing updates for F11 is the regression rate due to
lack of QA, I put Mesa packages into updates-testing that fixed a
lot of r300/r500 bugs back at the start of F11 and it went into
testing a few weeks later and broke Intel, I got 0 reports during that
u-t phase about breakage. So now I have a package in stable that
lets 3D works for x num of people and breaks compiz for y number.
So I've pretty much given up on pushing anything to previous Fedora
releases that isn't a security fix or major crash fix, because we simply
don't have the QA in place to avoid regression current users, at least
if you install F11 on your hw, and it doesn't work well, you know that,
if you install it and it works well then later stops working well, thats
a lot worse situation to end up in.
I think for F12 updates we could really do with some sort of side repo
setup, so we could have a stability period where QA could happen on
packages that may end up in updates a month or two later.
Dave.
Given that there is a lot of development work to do on these drivers
(which is why you find the newer versions better...) and a lot of bugs
to fix (we generally barely keep up with the rate of bugs filed as it
is), we don't see that as a good trade-off. You'd get backported drivers
for stable releases, but the rate of development of the actual upstream
drivers would be noticeably slowed, and fewer reported bugs would
ultimately get fixed.
Backporting packages is not intrinsically very difficult, though it is
somewhat time-consuming, so it's something for which a far greater
candidate pool exists than X driver development. Thus, the suggestion
that someone else do it. For instance, you. It seems you've already
successfully built the latest versions of things locally; if you can do
that, you can put them in a package and put the package in a repository,
it's not a very hard process and it's all documented on the Wiki.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
I totally agree with you on the QA issue. Maybe I am wrong, but I haven't
seen any real set of tests to be performed on Fedora 3D graphics.
I tried the ATI test day for graphics. On the 3D graphics side it said to
run "glxgears" and if you like other 3D apps that you use. Running your
other 3D apps is difficult from a limited Live distribution...
I really think a simple test procedure should be implemented and documented
to at least check for basic functionality with the main 3D applications.
Ideally an automatic test program should be part of this.
This would allow a relative novice to test the 3D system on their hardware
and hopefully automatically feed back constructive results from the
myriad of different graphics hardware options.
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