On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 20:47 +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
Although I understand Fedora's frontier status, I think the
graphics
system changes could probably have been handled better. After the kernel and
core shared libraries the graphics system is probably the next essential
core OS subsystem (At least for desktop systems). It seems most of peoples
stability issues with fedora stem from graphics. I do understand the
difficulty with the multitude of different graphics chipsets out there. But
this is where Fedora could shine with its close links to upstream development.
It would have been good to be very upfront with this and get a group to
define and setup some basic graphics tests and loudly promote users to
perform tests with these both pre-release and post-release.
We've done this, since F11, with the Graphics Test Days. They get a very
large response. That's mostly how we know what's broken.
This with a
website with test status versus graphics board/chipsets and with good
easy linkages to Bugzilla (more user friendly)
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-09_Radeon#Results
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-10_Nouveau#Results
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-11_Intel#Results
and perhaps a separate
graphics-testing repository to keep quick graphics updates away from
the "stable" release etc.
This would likely do more harm than good by increasing developer
overhead and making everyone very confused about exactly what anyone was
running...
If enough upstream developers, Fedora packagers
and testing users were in on this I think great inroads into getting stable
and good graphics systems would be made in a relatively short time.
That's somewhat optimistic; no matter how much testing we do, we can
only afford a certain amount of full-time developer muscle. The testing
has helped to improve efficiency and direction of graphics development
work, I think, but there's fundamentally a lot of work to do and only a
limited amount of manpower to do it with.
The X devs are always very happy to take new volunteers. :)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net