This is the ninth “Debian XSF News” issue. As can be seen below, I’m not yet decided how to present various items. This time, I’ll try to gather all updated packages since the previous issue, grouped by category, with a single line summary. Lengthy comments come after that list of updated packages.

1. Here come the updated packages, with contributors/uploaders between square brackets (Timo = Timo Aaltonen, JVdG = Julien Viard de Galbert, Robert = Robert Hooker).

Protocol:

• [KiBi] x11proto-core: new upstream release, bringing Sinhala support → experimental.

Libraries:

• [Timo,KiBi] libx11: new upstream release, fixing some hang issues → unstable.

• [KiBi] libxi: new upstream release → unstable.

• [KiBi] libxkbcommon: finally accepted by ftpmasters, needed for wayland → experimental.

Server:

• [KiBi] xorg-server: stable release 1.9.5, unlikely to cause regressions from the previous release candidate; in other words: a good candidate for testing if the Linux kernel migrates some day → unstable.

• [KiBi] xorg-server: first release candidate for the first stable bugfix release in the 1.10 series, which finally builds → experimental.

Drivers:

• [KiBi] xserver-xorg-input-mouse: two cherry-picks of upstream commits to fix Hurd support, thanks to Samuel Thibault → unstable.

• [KiBi] xserver-xorg-input-mouse: rebuild of the unstable version against experimental’s server → experimental.

• [KiBi] xserver-xorg-video-ati: new upstream release → experimental.

• [KiBi] xserver-xorg-video-intel: new upstream release candidate → experimental.

• [JVdG] xserver-xorg-video-openchrome: new upstream snapshot, and build fix for Hurd → unstable.

Others:

• [KiBi] xorg: originally a few tweaks to make it possible to install X on Hurd → unstable…

• [KiBi] xorg: … but wkhtmltopdf failed on several buildds, so I disabled PDF generation, and completed the switch to asciidoc mentioned in DXN#8 → unstable.

• [KiBi] xorg-sgml-doctools: new upstream release, adds support for docbook external references → unstable.

• [Robert,KiBi] xutils-dev: new util-macros release, and a version lookup file → unstable.

• Why am I carefully uploading video driver packages to experimental only? Because bad regressions happen, on a regular basis; so it seems quite nice to keep well-tested versions in unstable for now. Once the X stack has migrated to testing (which as explained in DXN#7 and DXN#8 is waiting for the Linux kernel to migrate), new versions in unstable are welcome, so that one can tell easily whether bugs with those versions are regressions from the versions available in testing. In the meanwhile, one can build packages from the git repositories, using the debian-unstable branch (which is the default).

• Why am I so rash then, uploading input drivers to unstable as they are released? First of all, our waiting for the kernel means we have no issues on the 10-day delay front. Second of all, input bugs are usually fixed very quickly upstream (you can go there and thank Peter Hutterer in particular). So staying very close to whatever upstream ships makes some sense.

• Why am I uploading drivers twice? Since it isn’t specific to the current situation, but a general question when it comes to supporting two versions of the server in parallel, I decided to document that in an handling multiple server versions thanks to experimental page. The answer to this specific question is available in the note at the bottom of that page.

See you in a few days for a follow-up “Debian XSF News” issue.