On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 20:47 +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
Although I understand Fedora's frontier status, I think the graphics system changes could probably have been handled better. After the kernel and core shared libraries the graphics system is probably the next essential core OS subsystem (At least for desktop systems). It seems most of peoples stability issues with fedora stem from graphics. I do understand the difficulty with the multitude of different graphics chipsets out there. But this is where Fedora could shine with its close links to upstream development. It would have been good to be very upfront with this and get a group to define and setup some basic graphics tests and loudly promote users to perform tests with these both pre-release and post-release.
We've done this, since F11, with the Graphics Test Days. They get a very large response. That's mostly how we know what's broken.
This with a website with test status versus graphics board/chipsets and with good easy linkages to Bugzilla (more user friendly)
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-09_Radeon#Results https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-10_Nouveau#Results https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-11_Intel#Results
and perhaps a separate graphics-testing repository to keep quick graphics updates away from the "stable" release etc.
This would likely do more harm than good by increasing developer overhead and making everyone very confused about exactly what anyone was running...
If enough upstream developers, Fedora packagers and testing users were in on this I think great inroads into getting stable and good graphics systems would be made in a relatively short time.
That's somewhat optimistic; no matter how much testing we do, we can only afford a certain amount of full-time developer muscle. The testing has helped to improve efficiency and direction of graphics development work, I think, but there's fundamentally a lot of work to do and only a limited amount of manpower to do it with.
The X devs are always very happy to take new volunteers. :)