NEW_XORG and vt(4) in stable branches

[Niclas Zeising]

On 2014-02-12 20:43, John Baldwin wrote:
> I just wanted to drop a note to see if everyone is on the same page here.  I 
> know that core@ has been discussing the NEW_XORG internally quite a bit, but 
> that has all been internal to core@ so far.

Good to know that it is being worked on.
> 
> Our current feeling is that we would like to not enable NEW_XORG by default 
> for the packages for a given src branch until vt(4) has been merged to that 
> branch.  We do not think that vt(4) needs to be enabled by default in the 
> branch; just having it available as an option as it is in HEAD would be 
> sufficient.  Our understanding is that merging vt(4) in its current-ish form 
> to stable/10 and stable/9 is quite feasible and not a major nightmare.  We do 
> not feel that it is necessary to merge to stable/8 as drm2 isn't merged to 
> stable/8 either.  (Our assumption is that stable/8 will just stay with the old 
> Xorg and the ports tree will have to support old Xorg until 8.x support in 
> ports is EOL'd.)

I understand your (core's) position on not wanting to enable NEW_XORG
untill vt(4) is merged.  I currently don't know status of such a merge,
hopefully ray@ can fill in with that.
stable/8 is getting harder and harder to maintain, at some point we will
have to start breaking stuff, as will the kde team it sounds like.  Of
course we do our best not to do this.
> 
> Does that sound sensible?  Are any of our assumptions above incorrect?
I don't know any details about how easy or hard it is to merge vt(4),
but apart from that it sounds sensible.
> 
> I know that on the Graphics page on the wiki, the x11@ team has a target date 
> of enabling NEW_XORG for stable branches (is that 9 and 10?) in March.  Do we 
> think vt(4) can be merged to stable/10 and stable/9 before then?
> 

March was picked as a target date mostly because of cario.
graphics/cairo causes artifacts on some combinations of hardware (mostly
intel it seems) when used with the old xorg.  March was picked as a
target date for kwm@ to merge gnome3, and gnome3 will need a recent
cairo.  I don't know about any plans for merging vt(4).
With regards to cairo, we will probably have update that port anyway,
regardless of the default version of xorg.  There have been reports from
gecko people (at least) about our old cairo causing issues as well, so
no matter what we do some things will break.
If we update cairo without switching xorg version, it is possible to
change the NEW_XORG date to wait for a merge of vt(4).

I hope this clears things up, otherwise please let me/us know!
Regards!
-- 
Niclas