revert b59757e468227127b91fff17b523da4deec8b04d

[Aaron Plattner]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 01:56:06AM +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
> * PGP Signed by an unknown key
> 
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 07:13:59AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > I do not see the point of adding autoconfig for drivers we don't ship
> > with X.org.
> > 
> > Please ship the driver source with X.org and we can add autoconfigure support.
> 
> ACK.
> 
> As I said on IRC (it was asked around for on IRC last week, when I
> wasn't around: not that I begrudge you for that, god knows I've been
> guilty of the same), it's a driver we cannot even begin to support.  We
> keep a product in our Bugzilla merely to ensure we don't waste our time
> with a binary-only driver.  Likewise, we deflect support queries on the
> mailing list to the vendor.

That's fine.  Nobody expects freedesktop.org to provide tech support for
3rd-party drivers.

> I appreciate your decision to ship a binary-only driver.  It's not my
> concern, nor is it my place to tell you (NVIDIA) what to do.  X.Org's
> license even allows this sort of thing, for good or bad.  (Perhaps if we
> had better documentation, the SI could merely be that: a _sample_
> implementation.)
> 
> What you're doing, aside from being partially pointless (this will
> rarely work in master due to ABI changes, and no-one outside of some
> admittedly very nice buildings in Mountain View can recompile), is

It's not pointless, it provides improved functionality for users who
install the driver with a supported server.  If it's not supported, it
falls back to nv, just like it would without this change.

> imposing an additional support burden on X.Org.  Why would we ever
> recommend -- and use by default -- something which we cannot support?
> We can barely even support nv as it is.  Having NVIDIA's business
> decision to write a closed-source driver imposed on a volunteer group of
> open source developers is rather distasteful.

Driver autoconfiguration doesn't impose anything on anybody.  It simply
tries to choose the correct default for the most people.  This includes (or
should include, in my view), users who install 3rd-party drivers.  Am I
wrong in thinking that the supported drivers are the ones that are
distributed on xorg.freedesktop.org and included in the katamaris?

> Please revert, as we do not, cannot, and will not support binary-only
> drivers.  You're welcome to attempt to convince distributions of its
> merit, however: it's a free world.

I'll revert it if you really think that's what's best for users, but I
strongly believe that that would be a step backward in the quality of the
server.

-- Aaron