Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

Il giorno ven, 15/05/2009 alle 16.34 +0200, Markus Hitter ha scritto:
> 
> As popularity increases, more vendors will attempt to provide
> drivers  
> at launch dates of new hardware. For now it's a reasonable strategy  
> to buy hardware which is at least half a year old or which is binary  
> compatible with such older hardware.
> 

Unfortunately, this is sometimes the worst advice to give. It seems to
me that in some cases both ubuntu and upstream silently, unconsciously,
collectively agree that old hardware should just die. Let me explain it
better: it is frequently the case that such hardware gets broken across
a release and remains broken for the whole release; in next release
something gets adjusted and something else typically gets broken. The
living proof is my laptop (toshiba tablet m400) whose entire hardware is
claimed to be supported since at least 3 years. And it is, in fact, once
you fiddle with the software.

Since Dapper I NEVER saw an ubuntu release into which everything worked
out of the box on this laptop. In EVERY release something was repaired,
but something else regressed to broken. I reported all the regressions
during alphas or sometimes betas, but in some cases there is just no
need to get either ubuntu's or upstream's attention on certain
regressions.

This also holds for external hardware. I have an external network card,
bought upon frustration after iwl3945 _replaced_ ipw3945, breaking it
with my home router, and nobody in ubuntu cared to consider forward port
of the drivers. Well, in hardy upgrades at some point it stopped working
and the situation on the bts is some strange open->duplicate->fix
released loop. I still have to find time to understand what happened
(but from intrepid on the card works).

Vincenzo