dropping old video drivers (was: new xorg stack in quantal-proposed)

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2012 at 03:43:18PM -0500, Micah Gersten wrote:
> On 08/02/2012 03:15 PM, Timo Aaltonen wrote:
> > <snip />
> > I didn't push updates for obsolete video drivers not depended on by
> > xserver-xorg-video-all, since I think it's probably time to remove them
> > from the archive (we dropped them from -video-all for 11.10). This
> > includes -apm, -ark, -chips, -glide, -glint, -i128, -i740, -rendition,
> > -s3virge, -tseng, -voodoo. Both users of such hw can still use 12.04 for
> > the next ~5y.
> >
> I would think as long as these cards are usable in machines still
> supported by the kernel, it would be great to keep them (if there's not
> an unreasonable amount of maintenance; I don't think rebuilds for each
> new xorg stack qualifies).

This was a pretty conservatively drawn up list.  To our knowledge no one
still uses this hardware; certainly no one is regularly testing it, as
we've seen no bug reports filed about them.

This is actually the last step in a process that started about a year or
two ago, gradually moving the drivers out of main, out of the
-video-abi, etc.  Our plan was to keep them through to the next LTS
(precise) so if we were mistaken and there *is* some user out there with
this hardware, he or she can still use the LTS through its full support
cycle.  I think that's fair, and lets us drop vestigal drivers that
aren't actively maintained upstream.

We haven't heard from anyone that they still need these drivers.  And
after dropping them if anyone *does* need them and can state a good
case, it should be trivial to resurrect them.  But at this point to the
best of our knowledge the drivers are just unused clutter.

Bryce