xorg.conf file validator

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 08:29:02PM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 11:27:42AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Remember that apport is used for more than just crashes; we're encouraging
> testers to use it for reporting any bug, because it will attach relevant
> information.  If you're receiving bug reports from systems with invalid
> xorg.conf, this would help to filter those out.

True, however I don't think this will account for many bug reports.
With the xorg.conf shrinking, it's becoming less and less common to see
failures due to invalid xorg.conf's.  I'd rather see some invalid
xorg.conf's in launchpad than risk scaring people away from using
ubuntu-bug.  With brian's work we should have little problem flagging
these issues from our end.

Bryce