Enough news to release another “Debian XSF News” issue, after less than a week.

• Given HAL is deprecated, and going to die for real at some point, I’ve tried to look for alternatives since it’s still used on GNU/kFreeBSD to handle input hotplug in the X server. There’s devd on the FreeBSD side, but that only lets us know about device updates. I tried to get some input (pun intended) through debian-bsd@/freebsd-x11@/xorg-devel@, played a bit with devd and came up with a proposal. It’s quite ugly but it looks like it would work with minimal efforts, and I could then forget about HAL entirely. Guillem proposed something more generic/universal, but unfortunately, I have seen no replies yet.

• I uploaded a new xserver-xorg-video-ati upstream release to unstable, which comes with plenty of bug fixes, and better Evergreen support.

• It looks like the switch to r600 Gallium in mesa was a bit premature, so it’s going to be reverted in the next upload.

• I prepared stable updates for xorg-server and xserver-xorg-video-intel, which got both accepted quickly by our nice release managers. Our todo-list for squeeze is now empty again: no more bugs usertagged squeeze-candidate but not squeeze-accepted.

• I also updated xorg-server in unstable, including an important fix to the EXA acceleration layer, especially fixing a bunch of issues with the radeon driver. In other news, a big clean-up happened there, making the good ol’build system (“xsfbs”) go away.

• The missing video drivers for 1.9 were uploaded: Julien sponsored qxl, I uploaded the sparc drivers (suncg14, suncg3, suncg6, sunffb, sunleo, suntcx) from a porter box (thanks to the very responsive DSA team for the quick installation of needed build dependencies), and Aurélien Jarno kindly uploaded the newport driver for mips.

• In the meanwhile I uploaded the newly-released xorg-server 1.10rc2 to experimental, but only built a few drivers against it. On the video side, the API didn’t change much, so most drivers build without modifications: fbdev, then ati, mach64, r128 (ati depends on the other ones), as well as intel, nouveau, dummy (useful when there’s no monitor connected), and vesa. On the input side, many changes happened and one needs new upstream releases, except for the evdev driver (which I uploaded accordingly). Upstream is currently in the process of releasing other input drivers, so the following drivers should hit experimental soon: keyboard/kbd, mouse (both for non-Linux ports), and synaptics (better than evdev for touchpads).

• I put some bits of documentation in xorg-server’s README.source mentioning what to keep an eye on when upgrading to a new upstream release. For example, forgetting a version bump in xserver-xorg-dev’s dependencies could lead to build failures when xorg-server.pc is used, which is why I uploaded a new xorg-server revision…

Enough writing for now, I’m getting new mails in xorg-announce@.