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KiBi’s blog/ 2011/ 02/ 08/ Debian XSF News #4

Here comes the forth “Debian XSF News” issue! I usually try to keep the items sorted chronologically (but grouped by topic when possible), so if you’re wondering about the current status of X in unstable, make sure you read the last entry.

  • I prepared a reference documentation about dependency handling between the X server and the drivers. It describes both upstream and Debian sides, and documents the mechanisms to get the dependencies right. If you maintain an input or a video driver for X, you really should have a look into it.

  • I also announced the changes on debian-boot@ since the Graphical Installer is also concerned.

  • Since there are some drivers which aren’t maintained by the X Strike Force, I mailed almost all maintainers (plus the ones I missed) to keep them posted. Further coordination will go through a mail alias (which means a little less overhead than running a mailing list; mail me if you want to be added).

  • I prepared a great clean-up of the drivers, and published a status report 3 days later.

  • In order to keep track of people working on X packages these days, I started pinging the Uploaders of X packages. Thanks again, folks!

  • On the driver side, I moved the xserver-xorg-video-dove driver to the attic (where we move repositories of unmaintained packages), since it was only ever uploaded to Ubuntu, and not really maintained upstream. I also moved 7 drivers there, and requested their removal through RM bugs (each bug contains a link to the git repository in the attic in case someone wants to revive a driver): xserver-xorg-input-citron, xserver-xorg-input-evtouch, xserver-xorg-input-fpit, xserver-xorg-input-hyperpen, xserver-xorg-video-nv, xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd, xserver-xorg-video-v4l.

  • Julien Cristau also requested the removal of xprint and xprint-utils. He also orphaned xresprobe since it’s of no use as far as X is concerned, but still seems to be of some interest to DebianEdu folks.

  • I requested an update of debian-x@’s description. We haven’t been doing any “Debian XFree86 packaging” in a while.

  • I requested help from GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/Hurd folks, and got replies from Petr Salinger and Dave Airlie. Now mesa builds again on kfreebsd-amd64 (and kfreebsd-i386 once the remaining glitch is fixed).

  • In the same mesa upload, I enabled the r600 Gallium driver, and cherry-picked a commit to fix the crash at X’s start-up with r300 and UMS.

  • I merged the xsf-docs.git repository (source for XSF documentation at http://pkg-xorg.alioth.debian.org/) into the xorg.git one, and moved the former to the attic. Starting with xorg/xserver-xorg 1:7.6+2, XSF documentation is shipped in the xserver-xorg package, in the /usr/share/doc/xorg directory, in HTML, PDF, and TXT formats.

  • I also added a bug control file (as documented in reportbug’s README.developers) to xorg, telling reportbug to also report information related to the xserver-xorg package. This means we get xserver-xorg-core’s version, along with the drivers. I also made xorg depend on xserver-xorg with the same version, to make sure that upgrading xorg means upgrading xserver-xorg as well (and xserver-xorg-core ultimately, since xserver-xorg pulls a given version of the server).

  • Julien also uploaded a few libraries and mesa-demos (new source package for mesa-utils) to unstable. I also uploaded the latest pixman to unstable.

  • A few hours before squeeze got released, I prepared the big move of the X server from experimental to unstable. For the record that meant uploading libdrm, libxfont, and mesa as prerequisites. I then pushed the locally-built packages in a local archive to use from my sbuild chroot, to get xorg-server built. Subsequently, I built 45 drivers against it. The xorg metapackage was also prepared. All in all, that meant 200MB worth of Debian packages (including 130MB for mesa alone…), which sat on ravel.debian.org until the squeeze release announcement. Unfortunately, lintian’s #612137 triggered an automated rejection of all drivers. Options seemed to be: adding build dependency noise to debian/control for all drivers; or adding lintian-overrides noise to all drivers; or waiting for some reaction from lintian’s maintainers or from ftpmasters. I picked the last option for now, since I’m very reluctant to do extra and pointless work on 45 packages to get them accepted when the reason for the rejection is buggy. Hopefully this will be sorted out soon, and I’ll be able to upload the same packages again. If one feels the urge of installing X11R7.6, picking drivers from experimental will do the job.