xorg.conf file validator

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 11:03:25AM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 06:52:47PM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > Thanks again for identifying all of the xorg.conf's from launchpad for
> > testing X-Kit against.  This has helped make X-Kit more robust.
> > 
> > We realized that this validator might be useful to you too for automated
> > QA purposes.  Alberto has written a short script using python-xkit that
> > checks if a given xorg.conf file is valid.
> > 
> > If you have scripts which review incoming bugs, you could use this
> > script on any that have xorg.conf files attached.
> > 
> > As you can see from Alberto's testing, nearly 1 in 10 xorg.conf's people
> > submit are broken in some way, so running this validator on them could
> > help flag them quickly.
> 
> If it's reliable and accurate, perhaps this would be a good feature to add
> to the apport hook for the X server, to prevent reports of bugs caused by
> invalid configurations.

Not a bad idea, although I *think* that the class of bugs it'd detect
don't overlap with the class of bugs that would trigger apport.  Invalid
xorg.conf's result in a normal server exit with an error message.

Instead, what I was thinking is hooking it into the new bulletproof-x,
because invalid xorg.conf's are definitely one of the use cases that
triggers that.  (Probably as a user-selectable option "Validate
Configuration").  But the first step will be to get this script into the
x-kit package, and get x-kit into main.

Bryce