xf86CheckBeta() and friends

[Kristian Høgsberg]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 02:51:38PM -0500, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
>>Around 10 o'clock on Nov 12, Daniel Stone wrote:
>>
>>>It's bad because we don't want to walk the closed-source route.
>>
>>While I may agree with you in fact, I disagree with this particular 
>>arguement.  It has nothing to do with closed vs open source; the reality 
>>is that most people *don't* rebuild X for themselves, and the 'beta' flag 
>>provides distributions with a mechanism for encouraging people to get the 
>>released version of software instead of continuing to use potentially 
>>buggy software.  
> 
> Mmm, but it just has the whole vendor lock-in attitude to mine eyes.  As
> I said to Stuart, I understand the intent, and there's totally valid
> reasoning behind it (it's rather well-intentioned), I just really,
> incredibly, dislike the effects.

I never saw this as a lock-in mechanism, it's basically there to force 
people to upgrade from a beta release to the official release.  Only the 
beta releases expire, not the final releases.  I don't think it's evil, 
it's just pointless and annoying.  People compiling X.org themselves 
wouldn't enable this, and X.org don't provide binaries.  I don't see Red 
Hat ever providing timebomb binaries and I wouldn't think other 
distributors would want to either.

cheers,
Kristian