Long time no see…

Summary

Anyway, here are some quick news from the X packaging front, focussing on the past few weeks.

1. While I was busy doing other things, Julien took care of uploading lots of libraries (making most of them multiarch-aware) along with our usual meta-packages (like x11-apps, x11-utils, etc.), preparing for the upcoming 7.7 katamari.

2. Mesa 8.0.2 was finally uploaded to experimental, where it seems to be building fine, and working fine, at least for me.

3. Accordingly, I’m planning an upload to unstable very soon, and I won’t be disabling wayland support this time, since wayland/weston reached their first milestone with a public release (0.85). There’s nothing very interesting to see here, but since wayland support doesn’t really hurt, I thought I’d just keep it. That’s why wayland hit unstable yesterday; weston should follow after mesa. (In case somebody is in a hurry, they have been in experimental for quite some time already.)

4. Scrolling issues with the synaptics driver seem to be finally fixed thanks to rc4: #665004 was confirmed as fixed by many reporters (thanks everyone for the quick feedback after my ping). Accordingly, I’ve pinged the release team to get an age-days 3 to make it migrate faster, and a kind RM added that hint to his file, so testing is getting the fixed package thanks to this midnight’s britney run.

5. libcairo2/server/EXA/ati/nouveau fun: will be added through an edition of this post. Executive summary: downgrade libcairo2 to testing’s version if you’re seeing text corruptions.

Upcoming X server transition

X server 1.12 has been prepared in experimental for a while, from release candidates to the first stable release from server-1.12-branch. Since a bunch of drivers were uploaded to cope with that version when it shows up, we should be able to upload xorg-server 1.12 to unstable VERY SOON.

What does that mean?

Basically, that’s a transition. In details:

1. We upload xorg-server, and wait for it to be built everywhere, then we trigger binNMUs for all architectures at once when it’s ready on all of them.

2. Unlike shared libraries, there’s no old and new library packages (old+new SONAME); instead, the server itself provides different packages (because of the different input and video ABI). That means that drivers won’t be installable until they are rebuilt against the new server. Usually, we’re talking about a few dinstall runs, meaning less than a day.

Frequently Yelled Phrases:

1. Upgrades are broken! No, it just means you can’t upgrade the server alone, you need the drivers too (see above).

2. Installations are broken! Well, that’s unstable, and you probably know installability-related issues are trivially solved by pulling packages from testing when needed. This is such a case.

Please don’t report bugs on this topic, thanks already, and enjoy that new server.