Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>]

So there is a pattern... update xorg stuff... stuff stops working.
I rememeber my keyboard settings in xorg.conf being ignored, forcing me
to use xmodmap at runtime.
Could be related to the evdev thing...

Keyboard and Mouse just being disabled without warning and no way to
recover would be called epic FAIL in certain circles.
Why do the xorg people insist on making life hard for users?

Now, I am seriously pi**ed off by this one (yeah, I'm late to notice
that)
from
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-September/028133.html:

> With randr1.2(introduced from xserver 1.3), virtual desktop does not
> work. 
> The "Virtual" Option in xorg.conf is used to set the initial framebuffer
> size.
> randr1.3 will support virtual desktop again.

So, I realize that for over a year virtual desktops don't work anymore
in xorg, while we wait for the new xrandr.
I really started swearing while trying to increase the virtual size of
my desktop so that I can see all of ardour2 on screen (at least after
panning around).
The worse thing is that they didn't remove the "Virtual" Option but
gave it a different meaning -- so I got no clue that I was messing with
the wrong setting!

The net is full of angry eeePc users that find themselves unable to use
the age-old feature of Xorg to have a bigger virtual screen.
It does dot work what has worked before! For the user that means that
Xorg is broken.

What this post/rant boils down to is this:
I have the feeling that you cannot just follow xorg module releases
when you want an X11 system that works.
Strictly, we'd need to wait till things match together in functionality
again, and p.ex. xrandr 1.3 fills the hole of the regression about
virtual screens.

I also feel that this may not be possible, because things are broken
for so long now...
And we already were _slow_ in adopting modular xorg. We failed to see
that even with perfectly working spells and dependencies, the whole
thing remains a highly unstable matter.

So every update of some xorg spell would need a BIG FAT WARNING
and a list of things that may be broken/different now.
Is there some authoritative list with the timeline of breakages/changes
in xorg?

I guess we would need to go too far back in time to have a "stable"
xorg, which again would miss important drivers, etc. So I'll have to
shut my mouth and keep dreaming of life without the bleeding edge in my
a**.


Thomas,

who now will look for xrandr 1.3 in some rcs repo ... or just install
xfree86-4.7 ??? Possibly that won't work anymore for us?

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