Question on multi-head Dapper->Hardy upgrades

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 12:33:15PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> What is our position on supporting upgrades of users with xorg.conf's
> that have Xinerama-based dual-head configurations to Hardy (where
> Xinerama is now deprecated)?  Is this an upgrade path that you are
> testing, or one we will not be supporting?  If the latter, what should
> we communicate to users about this?
> 
> (This also touches on a more general question - due to the wide
> variances that can exist in Dapper-era xorg.conf configurations, I think
> it may be extremely hard to assure their old xorg.conf's will upgrade
> problem-free.  Should we set aside their Dapper xorg.conf on upgrade and
> generate a new one that uses Xorg autodetection?)

Is it possible to detect the common failure cases?  If so, I suggest:

if xorg.conf is customised AND problematic:
	display (or queue) a notification telling the user:
		what we're doing about this situation
		why
		how they can get what they want (e.g. wiki page, config tool)
	back it up
else:
	leave the configuration alone

If their custom configuration is broken in some less obvious way, that's why
we have bullet-proof-x, right?  We should not proactively clobber their
configuration unless we have reason to believe it won't work.

-- 
 - mdz