x11/nvidia-{driver, settings, xconfig}: why not the latest available version (290.10)?

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 04:44:04PM +0800, Denise H. G. wrote:
> On 2011/12/24 at 08:41, "Conrad J. Sabatier" <conrads at cox.net> wrote:
> > Just wondering why the x11/nvidia-{driver,settings,xconfig} ports have
> > yet to be updated to the latest version (290.10).  Are there any known
> > issues with any of these newer versions that would make such an upgrade
> > ill-advised?
> > 
> > FWIW, I've been running nvidia-driver version 290.10 since shortly after
> > it was made available on the Nvidia site, and haven't run across any
> > issues that can be directly attributed to the driver, at least, not to
> > the best of my knowledge.
> 
> 290.10 has some issues on text redrawing as far I experience. I have
> also been running 290.10 for quite a while. Some apps, especially emacs
> and gnome-terminal will fail redrawing text areas while, e.g. scrolling.
> And x11 cursor cannot sometimes be displayed correctly.
> 
> When I downgrade to 285.09.05, things seem to be OK.

Yes, there are existing issues with their latest version, which delaying
update of the port.  But we'll get there, eventually.  ;-)

> > As an aside, I've also been wondering for quite a while now why the
> > nvidia-driver port isn't under the x11-drivers category, rather than
> > simply x11.  Not awfully important, just curious.  :-)

Short answer: because it is not just driver in xorg sense.  For long answer,
see e.g. this:

	http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/121930

Theoretically, I could split the port into driver (kernel + xorg server
parts), libGL and linux compat libs; some GNU/Linux distros do that.  But I
really prefer to maintain one port than keeping three or five in sync.  It
makes sense if any of these subports could be used independently, but this
is not true at least for now.

./danfe