I am...unimpressed with this newest upgrade of X

[J. Altman]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 06:04:12AM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>
> I agree that Xorg quality has gone downhill since the 6.x series 

6.x FreeBSD, or 6.x X?

> but your posting doesn't actually contain any information that would
> allow bugs to be identified and corrected.

And if I had more information about what appears to originate in the X
upgrade, I would offer it. I managed to fix, on my own, the issue with
the failure to load the video drivers and thought that would be the
end of it.

Not so.

I only know that suddenly, at least two applications are crashing. My
post to -questions basically asks if anyone else is seeing the same
issue; so far, no one else seems to be seeing the issue with
Seamonkey.

I have no idea if it's an issue for the FreeBSD maintainers; the
Seamonkey maintainers; or the X maintainers. Seamonkey has not changed
in some time; X has. So I suspect it's the X maintainers, most likely,
that will need to investigate and push relevant changes downstream to
FreeBSD.

Or does it work some other way?

For the record: I do not want to slam the FreeBSD maintainers of
X. I'd rather not spend my time second-guessing them, either. I do
think that (and it seems you may somewhat agree, based on your
comments about quality since 6.x) moving forward, a somewhat jaundiced
eye might be the one to direct toward future "upgrades" to X on
FreeBSD.

I think that the number of trouble reports with this basic subject: "I
upgraded X and now I have no GUI/mouse/keyboard" might support my
opinion.

I can understand (and have lived with) non-critical things failing;
but it seems that Intel and ATI GPUs are not non-critical. 

> Note that there was a "call for testing" for Xorg 7.5 in mid-March
> which allowed some of the rough edges to be corrected before it was
> actually committed.  

Interesting. Yet, somehow, the rough edges of failure to load video
drivers for what appears to be multiple ATI and Intel GPUs were not
detected. By anyone. That seems to be a rather wide rough edge. But I
could be very, very wrong.

Was there a security issue leading to this "upgrade" of X on FreeBSD?
I see no security notices about 7.4 at Xorg. I do see some about 7.3.

If security was not an issue, then I hope it is not decided that it
was a case of seeing something shiny that led to the decision to
upgrade X on FreeBSD. IMO, the trailing edge is a comfortable
place. But I can understand the pressure that might be applied to
maintainers by early adopters of new shininess. 

> You might like to consider taking part in similar testing in future.

Doubtful. That would require multiple machines.

Thanks for the followup.