Unhappy Xorg upgrade

[Peter Jeremy]

As a general note, this is the second time in a row that an X.org
upgrade broke X for a significant number of people.  IMO, this
suggests that our approach to X.org upgrades needs significant changes
(see below).  X11 is a critical component for anyone who is using
FreeBSD as a desktop and having upgrades fail or come with significant
POLA violations and regressions for significant numbers of people is
not acceptable.

On 2009-Jan-29 08:40:11 -0500, Robert Noland <rnoland at freebsd.org> wrote:
>I've had patches available for probably a couple of months now posted to
>freebsd-x11 at .  For the few people who tested it, I had no real issues
>reported.

I didn't recall seeing any reference to patches so I went looking.
All I could find is a couple of references to a patchset existing
buried inside threads discussing specific problems with X.  The
majority of people who didn't have those specific problems probably
skipped the thread and never saw that a patchset was available.

When the X.org 7.0 upgrade was planned, a heads-up went out on a
number of mailing lists, together with a pointer to the patchset and
upgrade instructions and the upgrade did not proceed until both a
reasonable number of people reported success and reported problems had
been ironed out.  Given the ongoing problems with code provided by
X.org, I suggest that this approach needs to be followed for every
future release of X.org until (if) the X.org Project demonstrates that
they can provide release-quality code.

>  This update also brings in support for a
>lot of people who are running newer hardware.

And breaks support for lots of people who used to have functional
X servers.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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