This is the eighth “Debian XSF News” issue. For a change, I’m going to use a numbered list, which should help telling people which item to look for when pointing to a given URL. Feel free to let me know if that seems like a nice idea or whether that hurts readability.

Also, it was prepared several days ago already, so I’m publishing it (with the needed bits of polishing it still needed) without mentioning what happened in the last few days (see you in the next DXN issue!).

1. Let’s start with a few common bugs reported over the past few weeks:

   • The server can crash due to some X Font Server (XFS) issue as reported upstream in FDO#31501 or in Debian as #616578. The easy fix is to get rid of FontPath in xorg.conf, or to remove the xfs package. It’s deprecated anyway.
   • Xdm used to crash when started from init, but not afterwards (#617208). Not exactly fun to reproduce, but with the help of a VM, bisecting libxt to find the guilty commit was quite easy. After a quick upload with this commit reverted, a real fix was pushed upstream; a new upstream was released, packaged, and uploaded right after that.
   • We’ve had several reports of flickering screens, which are actually due to upowerd’s polling every 30 seconds: #613745.
   • Many bug reports were filed due to a regression on the kernel side for the 6.0.1 squeeze point release, leading to cursor issues with Intel graphics: #618665.

2. Receiving several similar reports reminded me of the CurrentProblemsInUnstable page on the wiki, which is long unmaintained (and that’s why I’m not linking to it). I’m not exactly sure what to do at this point, but I think having a similar page on http://pkg-xorg.alioth.debian.org/, linked from the how to report bugs page would make sense. Common issues as well as their solutions or workarounds for stable should probably go to the FAQ instead.

3. As explained in DXN#7, we’re waiting for the kernel to migrate to testing. The 2.6.38 upstream release was quickly pushed to unstable, which is great news, even if it’s not really ready yet (since it’s still failing to build on armel and mips).

4. I’ve been using markdown for our documentation, basically since it looked sufficient for our needs, and since I’ve been using it to blog for years now, but it had some limitations. I’ve been hearing a lot of nice things about asciidoc for a while (hi, Corsac!), so I gave it a quick shot. Being quite happy with it, I converted our documentation to asciidoc, which at the bare minimum buys us a nice CSS (at least nicer than the one I wrote…), and with automatic table of contents if we ask for it, which should help navigating to the appropriate place. A few drawbacks:

   • The syntax (or the parser’s behaviour) changed a lot since lenny’s version, so updating the online documentation broke badly. Thanks to the nice Alioth admins, the version from lenny-backports was quickly installed and the website should look fine.
   • The automatic table of contents is generated through JavaScript, which doesn’t play nicely with wkhtmltopdf (WebKit-based HTML to PDF converter), since the table of contents gets pixelated in the generated PDF documents. We could use a2x to generate documents through the DocBook way, but that means dealing with XSL stylesheets as far as I can tell; that looks time-consuming and a rather low-priority task. But of course, contributions are welcome.

5. When I fixed missing XSecurity (#599657) for squeeze, I didn’t notice the 1.9 packages were forked right before that, so were affected too. I fixed it in sid since then (and in git for experimental). I noticed that when Ian reported a crash with large timeouts in xauth calls, which I couldn’t reproduce since untrusted cookies without XSecurity don’t trigger this issue. I reported that upstream as FDO#35066, which got marked as a duplicate of (currently restricted) FDO#27134. My patch is currently still waiting for a review.

6. Let’s mention upcoming updates, prepared in git, but not uploaded yet:

   • mesa 7.10.1, prepared by Chris (RAOF); will probably be uploaded to experimental, unless 7.10 migrates to testing first, in which case that update will target unstable.
   • Intel driver: Lintian’s been complaining about the .so symlinks for a while, and I finally gave it a quick look. It seems one is supposed to put e.g. libI810XvMC.so.1 in /etc/X11/XvMCConfig to use that library, so the symlinks are indeed not needed at all, and I removed them.
   • Tias Guns and Timo Aaltonen introduced xinput-calibrator in a git repository; that’s a generic touchscreen calibration tool.

7. Here come the updated packages, with uploader between square brackets (JVdG = Julien Viard de Galbert, Sean = Sean Finney). For the next issue, I’ll try to link to the relevant entries in the Package Tracking System.

   • [KiBi] libxt: to unstable, as mentioned above, with a hot fix, then with a real fix.
   • [KiBi] synaptics input driver: to unstable and experimental, fixing the FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD.
   • [KiBi] xterm: new upstream, to unstable.
   • [KiBi] libdrm: new upstream, to experimental. A few patches to hide private symbols were sent upstream, but I’ve seen no reactions yet (and that apparently happened in the past already).
   • [KiBi] xorg-server 1.9.5rc1 then 1.9.5, to unstable.
   • [KiBi] xutils-dev to unstable: the bootstrap issue goes away, thanks to Steve’s report.
   • [KiBi] libxp to unstable, nothing fancy, that’s libxp…
   • [KiBi] keyboard input driver: mostly documentation update, to unstable and experimental.
   • [KiBi] mouse input driver: fixes BSD issues, to unstable and experimental.
   • [KiBi] intel video driver: to experimental, but the debian-unstable branch can be used to build the driver against unstable’s server.
   • [KiBi] xfixes: protocol to unstable, and library to experimental (just in case); this brings support for pointer barriers.
   • [JVdG] openchrome video driver: Julien introduced a debugging package, and got rid of the (old!) via transitional package. He also performed his first upload as a Debian Maintainer. Yay!
   • [KiBi] siliconmotion video driver: to unstable.
   • [KiBi] pixman: new upstream release candidate, to experimental
   • [Sean] last but not least: many compiz packages to experimental.