Ken Moffat wrote: > For the little that my thoughts on this are worth (inter-alia, I > only build for radeon and nv, I'm much more concerned with issues > on non-x86 architectures, I don't make any use of dbus, and I > certainly don't build hal or use the gnome or kde desktops - call > me an old fogey if you like ;) > Aite old fogey it is! ;-) But thanks for the quick reply, your comments have already proven useful. > 1. BLFS almost looks as if it has set its face against xcb. Works > fine for me, even in 7.2. Of course, I've dropped all binary > packages other than realplayer on x86. > > That was the decision when it was new but it is there in svn. On my previous 6.3 build I had used xcb and haven't had any issues. If I remember correctly, there was a patch to side step the problem, unfortunately, I don't recall what the problem was exactly....oh yeah, assert...I remember. And, contrary to the patches header information, the patch was accepted upstream and is present in 1.1.2. I don't think it's a big issue, I don't have LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK in my environment and no known problems. Of course, I don't use binary packages at all. > 3. Possibly, some of the drivers need the new 'pci' library > (pciaccess) - certainly, neither ati nor nv, nor any of the > non-video drivers that I build, use it. But, there was a comment > from I think Keith Packard on lkml the other week which implied it > was in use in xorg-7.3. > > That was new to me. :-) I'd have found it the hard way. You've probably saved me a couple of reboots for a web browser. Thanks. I really should install links. > 4. Evdev-1.2.0 is apparently required, but I don't notice the > difference compared to the previous version (maybe I would notice if > I knew what it did, maybe not). > It's a generic input driver. From the manpage** "*evdev* is an Xorg input driver for Linux's generic event devices. It therefore supports all input devices that the kernel knows about, including most mice and keyboards." But I think all the fixes requiring 1.2.0 are related to reliablility of input hotplug, hence why you don't see an issue. I'm also not so confident with Hal anymore (as if I ever was). A sample policy will have to be provided in the x-config page. > 5. For the ati drivers, 6.7.196 is definitely good IMHO (haven't tried > .197 in a known good environment yet). Supposedly, 6.7 is needed > for randr-1.2, but the latest 6.6 seemed ok to me on one machine > when 6.7.195 was both the latest release and broken. > My cards are too old on my dev PC. I'm gonna have to LFS my new one soon, but sticking to strait x86 until 6.3 is released. Maybe I can drum up a 9600 or something cheap someplace. > 6. I've spoken too much about pixman-0.9.6 on support ;) Again, it > depends on the architecture and perhaps on the video driver - my > ppc64 with nv and ppc with radeon are happy with 0.9.5, other arches > aren't. > > 7. Server 1.4.0.90 seems good, and might be as good as we get before > 1.5. > Has there been a discussion on the xorg mailing lists? I didn't see it, but I do see that 1.4.1 has been pushed back about a month and a half and running now. Still 6 blockers on it, IIRC 4 of which can be 'cherry picked' from 'master'. I hope that's correct...I'm still not comfy with their terminology, or git for that matter. Are those typical git terms? On a side note, we probably need to add git to the book at some point. > Funnily enough, I built 7.2 using the versions in blfs (plus xcb > stuff) a couple of days ago for the LFS-6.3 system I've just > installed. I was somewhat surprised to see that blfs seemed to be > recommending people to download all of the video drivers. In the > beginning, replicating the non-modular build had merit, but a lot of > the parts are no longer useful to most people with semi-modern > installations, and encouraging people to build all of the video > drivers just highlights that. > > I looked at the pages, and they could use some rewording I think. As with input drivers too. Right now, we do recommend all for brevity/simplicity. Joe User might want to hotplug his SuperDraw 2008 (???) for LinCAD 2007 (???). With his kernel patch, we'll identify it as a 60 button mouse, is evdev a minimum or a standard requirement? At this point, I'd think standard, but you, with good reason, might disagree. This is where the wiki was supposed to come into play. A few users have added comments, but I'm as guilty as the next. While I could pretend and use "editor responsibility" as an excuse, I also have drive space to kill and just lazily build the whole schebang. > I don't have an opinion about whether 7.2 or 7.3 should be in 6.3, > there are enough other old things like gnome-2.18 and kde-3.5.6 : > for what I'm using, I don't see any "must upgrade" things in any of > these (in itself, that is good - it's not that long since a version > upgrade fixed noticeable bugs or made things noticeably better). > > The pain is in identifying good versions of everything, > particularly the video drivers, and trying to find reliable > information on which versions are intended to be used in 7.3. > > ĸen > Well, I would tend to think that the list of packages in the X11R7.3/src directory would be a good indicator, but that has yet to be the case. :-) I wish they had some actual documentation on the website as for which to use with which release. Best we can get, at least that I know of, is to dig through configure and see what pkg-config is looking for...for each of 296 packages plus their various point releases above the ones in the release numbered directory. Is certainly not fun after a while, and I gave up looking at *all* the package versions. I'll go back through it after I have a working build.
-- DJ Lucas -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
