revert b59757e468227127b91fff17b523da4deec8b04d

[Daniel Stone]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 04:43:15PM -0700, Aaron Plattner wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 01:56:06AM +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > * PGP Signed by an unknown key

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key b2808094

> > 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.

Good, so we don't need this change then.

> It simply tries to choose the correct default for the most people.

'Correct' is wonderfully subjective.  'Correct' for people using git
master is almost certainly not nvidia, objectively given the ABI breaks.
You could also argue that putting this patch in reaches such a miniscule
proportion of users who have already gone through the ordeal of actually
building our software -- not quite as difficult as creating an
xorg.conf, I admit -- rather than reaching the distributions.

Some distributions already go out of the way to ship the proprietary
driver, so surely they'd be more than willing to modify the autoconfig
list in the servers they also ship.

> This includes (or
> should include, in my view), users who install 3rd-party drivers. 

I can understand how you would form that view.

> Am I
> wrong in thinking that the supported drivers are the ones that are
> distributed on xorg.freedesktop.org and included in the katamaris?

More or less.  There is one special case, which is the via nonsense:
given that we don't ship _any_ working, open-source, Via driver
(especially tragic as it's purely social, rather than technical, failure
-- ironic, as it's usually the converse).  NVIDIA hardware is already
well supported by an open source driver that's in git and distributed as
part of the katamari.  If this is not fit for purpose and you have an
alternate proposal, I'm all ears.

Of course, if you want to rename nvidia to nv, then this patch would
just magically work when people installed the proprietary driver.  After
all, having five drivers called nv_drv.so can't be too much worse than
four called nvidia_drv.so, no?

> > 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.

Yes, I do, and IRC seems to show a consensus around those who are
around, bar two.

Please, revert it.

Cheers,
Daniel
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