Should 9.3 carry a warning about NEW_XORG

[Adrian Chadd]

The TL;DR reason for going up to building with new-xorg is because
without it, an increasing number of X related ports plainly won't
build anymore. They assume the newer X and DRI libraries.

So the choice is (a) new_xorg and pain, (b) no new_xorg and a lot of X
packages not getting upgraded any further, (c) more work on the ports
maintainers to try and figure out ways to work around an increasingly
impossible situation. There's also (d) - don't bother with 9.3.

The X ports team has a fast moving target to keep track of and we're
still not anywhere near the bleeding edge of Linux graphics rendering
support and all the graphics stuff that moves with it. As much as I
hate to see lots of churn, it's a losing battle.



-a


On 5 July 2014 03:32, John Marshall <john.marshall at riverwillow.com.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Jul 2014, 15:31 -0400, Ed Maste wrote:
>> In HEAD syscons(4) and vt(4) are now both compiled in by default in
>> the GENERIC kernel.  Syscons remains the default at the moment; you
>> can set the loader tunable kern.vty=vt to choose vt(4) instead.  Vt is
>> selected automatically if booting via UEFI on amd64.
>>
>> Both stable/10 and stable/9 require a recompile to use vt(4).  The
>> plan is to merge these changes from HEAD in time for 10.1, but 9.3
>> will not have them.
>
> So, perhaps 9.3 should remain "opt in" like 9.2 and not build NEW_XORG
> by default?
>
>> Note that vt(4) enables vty switching from Xorg, but WITH_NEW_XORG
>> generally should not depend on vt(4).  X should work fine, just
>> without the ability to switch back to a vty.  If WITH_NEW_XORG fails
>> on certain hardware I think it'll be independent of the use of sc(v)
>> vs vt(4).
>
> Thank you, Ed, for taking the time to explain all that.  I had been
> under the impression that NEW_XORG depended on vt(4), which was why I
> modified my 9.3 kernel.  sc(4) worked fine after my initial upgrade,
> vt(4) works fine; it's just X that doesn't.
>
> Perhaps my "X no longer works" scenario is due to "certain hardware"?
> Is there a list somewhere of hardware on which NEW_XORG will not work,
> so that folks running 9.2 with that hardware can set WITHOUT_NEW_XORG
> BEFORE they upgrade to 9.3 and save themselves grief?
>
> --
> John Marshall