[ubuntu-x] Karmic status

[Timo Aaltonen]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009, Bryce Harrington wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Just wanted to give a quick update on where we are with X for karmic.
>
> -intel has been going swimmingly.  The 2.8.x series has been amazingly
> solid and we've been able to resolve a huge mess of bugs.  For the first
> time in a long, long time, -intel is no longer the video driver with the
> largest number of bug reports against it.  :-)
>
> It is possible 2.9 will be out in time for us to include it in Karmic,
> however at this point I'd be very comfortable shipping 2.8 given how
> solid it is, and just pull in bug fixes from the 2.9 tree.  But we'll
> keep an eye on developments and if 2.9 looks like a good opportunity we
> can consider it later.

If possible, I'd prefer a release. We'll see.

> On -ati, most of the interesting work has been going on in the
> xorg-edgers PPA and the kernel team.  Over the next few weeks I'm hoping
> to see much of this pulled into karmic, so we can work out any remaining
> kinks in KMS testing for -ati.

The API is not stable yet, most likely not before 2.6.32-rc1, so it's 
still a moving target. That means synchronized builds of the kernel, ddx, 
and mesa. I don't think the api is stable before the feature 
freeze, but there's the possibility to grab a snapshot and stick to it 
(but bugfixing would be hard).

> xserver 1.7 is looking late.  Partly this was expected at the outset,
> but I'd be more comfortable if we had a beta release we could include
> for alpha-4.  If we don't, should we be focusing instead on 1.6.x?
> I'd love to hear other people's thoughts here.

According to Peter the XI2 API is now stable, so there should be 
.901-releases of libxi, libx11 and inputproto soonish. Don't know how long 
the server is going to take. Moving API/ABI's are a pain, and the video 
ABI might change still, so snapshots would mean more work and rebuilds.


-- 
Timo Aaltonen
Systems Specialist
IT Services, Helsinki University of Technology