Re: Xorg 6.9 or 7.0 - still no RPM's?

Chris Wilkinson wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> houghi wrote:
>> Chris Wilkinson wrote:
>>
>>>Some of the other popular distros had R6.9 and R7 ready to download
>>>only a few days after the source escaped. The release of these was
>>>touted to be very important in the progression of X11 technology, so
>>>thats why I was a little perturbed as to why these files were not put
>>>out for download more quickly...
>>
>> Again, SUSE only does security updates, not version updates.
>
> I'm not expecting them to do version updates for everything, but
> some things are more important than others...this X11 I would
> consider to be one of those things...

Problem is, such a fundamental upgrade will require a lot of testing, it
isn't just re-compiling and RPMing the modules, it is running through the
entire test suite to ensure that everything runs correctly (i.e. every KDE,
Gnome and other WM's packages, and each graphical application, anything
with a graphical front end, the kernel and probably you'd need to do some
basic checks on non-graphical stuff to ensure that X11 isn't doing
something nasty that is causing system services or CLI stuff to be
disrupted.

Doing all of that would require a lot of effort and couldn't be released in
a couple of days. That's why something that is as big a change as that
would make it into the 10.1 or 10.2 release, not an update for 10.0.

Even fixing bugs in the version released with 10.0 wóuld require some
regression testing to ensure that it didn't break anything - does fixing
the bug cause strange behaviour in other application?

There is a lot of work involved in releasing a major update like that!

I really want to see KDE 4.0 under X11R7, but I'll wait until they have both
been fully tested and integrated into the SUSE packages...

> I would also guess that a large part of the SuSE userbase uses
> 9.3 Pro or 10.0. If they want to get an updated X11 without
> needing to compile or find trickily located rpms are they expected
> to upgrade their entire system to 10.1 Alpha 4? Thats currently
> the only SuSE with a newer than 6.8.2 X11 on it...

No, they would wait for 10.1 to be released for X11R6.9, for X11R7 I guess
we will have to wait for 10.2.

If you want to partake in the Beta program, by all means leap forward to the
Beta versions that are coming out. But for those of us who use SUSE as part
of our working environment, we are more interested in a stable environment
that allows us to work than getting a couple of new bells and whistles.

If 6.9 or 7 really have a feature that stops you working, then you will have
to source the RPM's for 9.3 or 10.0 for yourself if somebody makes them, or
you'll need to find a beta version using the RPM's and suffer any
instabilities that brings.

>>>Anyway R6.9 is now running on this machine, and it does improve a few
>>>issues that 6.8.2 had. Some apps seem to still be having trouble with
>>>resize and dynamic window sizing, but R7.1 will be eagerly awaited...
>>
>> I hope you understand that any issues you will have to solve it
>> yourself.
>
> Issues such as? I'm not stupid, but X11R7 is far from being as simple
> as './configure, make, make install...' Simply understanding which
> files to download is difficult with the way the docs are written...
>
> No doubt there are individuals who can compile stuff like that for
> themselves. For the rest of us is it too much to ask for rpms to
> be created? Not all of us have the time or knowledge (or dare I say
> it, the patience?) to do such large compiles...
>

As above, my guess is the official development team is hard ironing out any
issues with 6.9 ready for releasing it in SUSE 10.1, so it will be up to a
keen member of the community to try and get X11R7 working under 10.0. My
guess is, looking at the current 10.1 Alpha's is that you will have to wait
until at least the second half of this year for an official X11R7 release.

And if you look at some other distributions, you will see that SUSE does a
fairly good job in staying current. Debian is still using KDE 3.3 for
example and only a 2.6.8 kernel, while SUSE is on 3.4 ans 2.6.13
respectively.

Again, that is "officially", you are totally free to b****r up your system
to your hearts content by compiling newer sources for yourself or finding
somebody who has packaged them up into RPM's. But the controlling
organisations/companies have to keep their userbase happy with a stable
environment, therefore they don't go throwing out untested packages the day
they are released, they will test them thoroughly and usually include them
in the next release. This keeps most people happy and those that aren't can
use the community repositories to track down any changes they want - or
submit them themselves.

If you think Xorg is a nightmare to compile and package, then don't be
suprised if it takes somebody a few days to compile it and run some
rudimentary tests before packaging it up and releasing it to the community!
You might whine that it wasn't on the community servers within a few hours
of release, but I bet you would have whined a lot more if the guy hadn't
done some testing first and just compiled and posted and it brought your
machine to a steam pile of spare parts because it caused all sorts of
inconsistencies and compatibility issues...

Dave


.

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