[Openchrome-users] Call for packagers

[Xavier Bachelot]

Jelle de Jong wrote:
> Xavier Bachelot wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Packagers and wannabe packagers, the openchrome project needs your 
>> help ! The driver is slowly but surely improving and getting in a 
>> better shape, but the users' mailing list and the irc channel are 
>> still full of basic user question related to compilation of the 
>> driver. This can and should be avoided, first because it raises the 
>> entry cost for new and often non-technical users (no offense intended) 
>> and also because it wastes developers/contributors time that could be 
>> used to enhance the documentation or other things more useful in the 
>> long run.
>>
>> We used to and are still maintaining a 'contributed binaries' page in 
>> the wiki, but it's often outdated or pointing at old versions of the 
>> driver. It would be much better to package and maintain the driver as 
>> official packages inside the various distributions around. This brings 
>> numerous advantages. The users don't have to search the web for 
>> packages and get them directly from their distribution's repositories 
>> without additional configuration. The driver is more easily available 
>> in the wild and gets better exposure and testing.
>>
>> This mail is primarily targeted at all the good people that used to 
>> and are still maintaining the packages that are linked from the 
>> 'contributed binaries' page. Thanks a lot for your work, it is greatly 
>> appreciated. I would just ask you to go a step further and get in 
>> touch with the maintainers of your distro of choice and do your best 
>> to have the openchrome driver included and maintained inside of it. 
>> There is also obviously some room for new packagers ;-)
>>
>> Thanks a lot for your attention and feel free to ask for help, I went 
>> down this road already for Fedora/RHEL, it is not as hard as it may 
>> sound and there's a lot to learn along the road.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Xavier
>>

Hi Jelle,
> 
> Hi am training myself to become a maintainer for the ubuntu systems. I 
> have planned a half a day a week to learn all the steps.
> 
afaik, openchrome is already available in Ubuntu, but the version 
shipped is rather old, at least in some releases.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=openchrome&searchon=names&subword=1&version=all&release=all
Please note I'm note using Ubuntu, so I might be plain wrong.

> I now support a install script for ubuntu that works great. However most 
> questions are around VBE, 3D MESO, and resolution problems. I still have 
> not seen a good solution for all of this.

Nothing can really be done about VBE when it's not behaving as expected, 
and this is the root of at least some of the resolution problems.
The VBE problems are going to be drastically reduced when Gabriel's new 
panel code will hit trunk (VBE is currently mostly use to set up laptop 
panels on everything but CLE266 and KM400 based laptop). VBE will then 
only be needed for DVI and VT1625 in some cases. As a side note, 
VBEModes options shouldn't be manually added to the xorg conf in most 
cases, the driver knows when he needs it.
3D is not really openchrome problem, this is handled by Mesa. 
Admittedly, in an ideal world, we'll have a team of openchrome 
developers handling the whole DDX, DRM and DRI chain, but we're 
unfortunately not in this ideal world. I could also write a call for 
developers, but it's not involving the same set of skills and I'm pretty 
sure anyone interested with writing code would have already showed up by 
now. I'm only trying to address the ease of installation for end user in 
this mail. There's obviously a lots more to do...

> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Jelle

Thanks for your comments.

Regards,
Xavier