Donnerstag, 30. September 2010

New Intel graphics drivers released

The Fedora developers among you will be aware: there is a Fedora Test Day with a focus on the Intel graphics card driver today (Thursday the 30th). The X.org driver that is being tested afaics is xorg-x11-drv-intel (also known as xf86-video-intel) version 2.12.0, release 6.fc14 -- the latest F14 build as of today.

Oh, and something else happened today: After three months of development Carl Worth released a xf86-video-intel version 2.13.0. Quoting the release announcement: "[...] With the many bug fixes in this release, we encourage everyone using 2.12 to upgrade to 2.13. [...]"

So people that participate in the testing today might run into bugs that that are fixed in 2.13 or in its pre-release already. But what is even worse from my point of view: With the new and recently ratified Fedora updates policy it seems unlikely to me that Fedora 14 will update to 2.13 ever (note: unlikely still means it's possible!).

My head simply fails to understand why that is the right thing to do in this and similar cases. Even worse: lot's of other distributions have similar policies, so it's take months or years till the fixes the Intel developers worked out in the past three months make their way to regular end users.

4 Kommentare:

nicu hat gesagt…

this new updated policy sucks so bad... it takes away many of the reasons some of us are using fedora

Rezza hat gesagt…

There's no problem in policies, problem is nobody listens to nobody. From both sides - some people have only "stable updates, stable updates whatever it means", some people only "update, update, whatever it means". I tried to propose compromise on every "Updates policy" mail but nobody listened and I got no support from other people (publicly, gazilions of pings on IRC but) so probably everyone is ok with new policy... You know "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...", we're the few.

Anonym hat gesagt…

The update policy only applies after release. F14 isn't out yet. Intel driver maintainers are perfectly free to push 2.13 now, if they want to.

Thorsten Leemhuis hat gesagt…

adamwill wrote:
> The update policy only applies after
> release.

Ehh, why does the update policy contain a section "Beta to Pre Release" then? Am I missing something here?

> [...] Intel driver maintainers are
> perfectly free to push 2.13 now,
> if they want to.

Above mentioned section contains things like "Major changes should be avoided during this period." or "Avoid Major version updates [...]".

But yes, they are free to push 2.13 now (which I indicated in my post already). But then why do a test day with the old version? Seems mostly (not completely!) pointless to me, especially as a pre-release of 2.13 was available for a few days already.