On Monday 02 May 2011 17:04:11 Kevin Kofler wrote:
Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> This is now a little bit surprising for me as it was a Fedora developer
> who urged me into raising the requirements. In fact I was even asked to
> raise it for the next minor release as a bugfix.
Uh, I never asked you to up the Mesa requirement to 7.10. The minimal change
to check for "Intel" instead of "GEM" in kwinglcheck (which is the
patch I
applied in the Fedora 15 kdebase-workspace package) only raises the
requirement to something much lower.
true, but in the end I considered that we can
only support Mesa 7.10, given that we know
about the problems with 7.9 and 7.8. So if adding a requirement I thought doing a proper
one,
where we know that it works quite decent and it matches what the Mesa devs want us to do
anyway.
I don't know the exact version (we'd have
to check the history), but the Intel driver has been DRI2 for years!
well it also
has to perform decent with direct rendering enabled and that is only since about
7.8/7.9.
And Adam
Jackson (also a Fedora developer) suggested cleaner ways to check whether
direct rendering will work, which (as far as I know) will also work fine on 7.9
and probably several older releases. There's a middle ground between
supporting everything ancient and requiring the very latest.
We tried to support
more than the most recent release and it broke badly. I think we will no
longer be able to support more than one driver release and I will consider to raise the
requirements with 4.8 again. We simply don't have the manpower to ensure that it is
working
with older drivers - especially if they can introduce regressions in minor releases :-(
And by the way, your new check (which assumes that Mesa == DRI2) is also
incorrect for Mesa 7.10 because DRI1 drivers still exist (e.g. i810/i830
legacy).
Without access to the hardware we will never know whether this works or
not. It is as
possible that another check disables direct rendering or that the hardware is too old in
general to properly support OpenGL compositing.
E.g. Fedora 15 still ships them (and it has a Mesa 7.11 snapshot),
only Fedora 16 will drop them. Some distros might keep them for even longer.
That said, we will probably not upgrade Fedora 14 to 4.7 anyway. We have been
doing only one KDE SC upgrade per Fedora release (i.e. offering the latest KDE
SC only on the latest Fedora) since Fedora 12. We may (or may not) be doing
unofficial packages though, and we may end up having to patch your OpenGL
checking code to make them work. :-(
Which is probably the better way as you know
which Mesa version is used.
Cheers
Martin Gräßlin