Unhappy Xorg upgrade

[Stephen Clark]

Alex Goncharov wrote:
> ,--- You/Bruce (Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:06:45 +0000) ----*
> |     One theory is that somehow the mouse driver ioctls which are passed 
> | to ums, are somehow hosing USB, although why that would be, I don't 
> | understand. ums currently doesn't have driver instrumentation in that path.
> | 
> |     I pulled a fairly detailed IRC log of my collaborative debugging 
> | session with Robert, please ping me if you need details of this.
> `----------------------------------------------------*
> 
> Thank you for the detailed write up!  No help to me, though -- on my
> Latitude laptop, there was no problem with any mouse: USB or the
> built-in "pointing device".  It was the keyboard -- and, trust me, I
> did try many variations of the machine configuration, and I did do a
> lot of reading on various relevant topics (writing, too, as you have
> seen :-()
> 
> As I mentioned elsewhere, my way of resolving the problem after a
> one-and-a-half day's of struggle was to revert to the old X (on that
> laptop).
> 
> On the topic of how this upgrade was introduced, I can't help but
> refer to my recent experience helping to fix TWM:
> 
> ,--- Eeri Kask (Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:21:17 +0200) ----*
> | > I have used the new version of TWM for five days, using it less
> | > intensively than usual. No problems in seen during my (light) use.
> | 
> | Hello Alex, no problem at all!  Improved solutions have priority over 
> | promised deadlines.
> | 
> | Thank you for your time helping to improve TWM,  :-)
> |
> `----------------------------------------------------*
> 
> Eeri Kask and I worked together all past September on fixing TWM
> crashes: I was willingly trying his multiple versions of the code, but
> I knew what I was risking, could choose convenient times for building
> and trying every new version (we tried about 30 of them) -- and I
> could always go back to the previous version (or the original TWM from
> ports).
> 
> I would be happy to try a new X on my machines, if it were labeled as
> experimental, with an easy way to revert to the old X (while being in
> the testing stage).  As it is, this upgrade brought a lot of problems
> to unsuspecting people, at the time they don't quite choose, with
> potential dangers not disclosed.
> 
> In honesty, this upgrade should have been presented this way, way
> before the code was placed in the ports source tree:
> 
>  * We'll have a new X in ports soon -- there are multiple reports of
>    problems with it on Linux.
> 
>  * We want to try it on FreeBSD -- but nobody is forcing you to do the
>    upgrade.
> 
>  * If you, of your own free will, choose to upgrade, you may have
>    hours and days of problems -- but heck, it was your choice.
> 
>  * If your problems cannot be fixed, you'll have to figure out
>    something yourself.
> 
>  * If you choose not to upgrade, you are frozen with the pre-existing
>    ports collection: there may be no automated ways to upgrade your
>    packages, with the old X in place.  Of course, you can somehow get
>    pieces on new ports, unrelated to X.
> 
>  * The choice is totally yours.
> 
> -- Alex -- alex-goncharov at comcast.net --
> 
> 
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> 
On my system the matrox driver quit working, when I tried using the built in via
the via driver wouldn't compile so when I tried X -configure it generated
a config using vesa, but when I tried to start X with the xorg.conf.new with
the vesa driver X said it couldn't find any screens. I finally had to revert 
back to an older version. This should not happen on a stable system.

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