Martin Takes His Mesa Issues To The List

[kraftman]

The Mesa developers said that they don't consider KDE to be one of its most important targets. That makes me wonder: if the first or second most-used X11 window manager isn't one of their most important targets, then who is? They don't say.

They're simply morons. Some of them are paid by Red Hat and it seems Red Hat doesn't care about desktops at all.

[plonoma]

The best and most practical solution would be letting KWin do a series of small tests when noticing the OS freshly installed, an update to drivers(other relevant software) or device change.
(Default on) So KWin can send automated bug reports and inform the user.

(Why is everyone having such a hard time figuring out what to do in a case like this?)

[plonoma]

More tests on Mesa wouldn't hurt either.
(Hint: Including starting multiple apps that use the card to see if they mess up.)

[BlackStar]

What I did find a bit sad in the reply's to Martin is that one person mentioned "Also as said half a year ago, blacklisting features in kwin based on some renderer string is a _very_ bad idea. " to me means they at least knew about it ? So they also knew that changing that string would cause problems ? They could have contacted Kwin dev about the upcoming change ?

The Mesa developers did warn Martin that blackclisting would not work in the long term, six months ago. As expected, it broke; this is not Mesa's fault.

In any case, the result of glGetString(GL_RENDERER) is *not* part of the ABI and should not be relied upon (it *will* change from version to version). The Mesa devs have shouted this time and time again, yet some people still manage to get it wrong.

[Nille]

A few months ago, the Kwin developers were complaining about another major FUBAR situation with Mesa, but I think it was related to the radeon drivers.

No. because KDE don't test there Desktop with ATI. Read the Email and Marek say that the driver don't export EXT that the not Support.

Martin goes on to talk about how NVIDIA doesn't change their renderer line. Why is this such a difficult concept to grasp?

Who cares?

Open-source developers, stop changing stuff just to change it. It breaks other code.

If KDE want to prevent regressions why not add some Piglit tests?

[Nille]

More tests on Mesa wouldn't hurt either.
(Hint: Including starting multiple apps that use the card to see if they mess up.)

Mesa has an Test Suit but there are no tests for KDE. Maybe because none from KWin want to make an piglit test.

[not.sure]

They're simply morons. Some of them are paid by Red Hat and it seems Red Hat doesn't care about desktops at all.

I guess they don't care about kde (and I don't blame 'em).
Perhaps one of the Novell mesa developers can test kde and make sure it works for suse distros.

[mattst88]

Honestly, I don't get how this is the responsibility of anyone but Intel/Mesa. If you look at the change to the renderer line, it wasn't done for any purpose. It didn't change vocabulary to convey a different feature-set. All they did was remove "GEM" from the renderer line. Why Intel? It doesn't make any sense. It was a careless change that served no useful purpose.

Open-source developers, stop changing stuff just to change it. It breaks other code.

Maybe do a little bit of research before you start spouting off when you have absolutely no idea what you're saying?

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ch/006321.html
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mes...fe3e505674705a
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mes...2d6991a7385b59

[kraftman]

I guess they don't care about kde (and I don't blame 'em).
Perhaps one of the Novell mesa developers can test kde and make sure it works for suse distros.

This is probably true and this makes me thinking if I shouldn't just trow my card away, because I don't care about gnome at all. If open source drivers I'm using are made for gnome they're useless for me. I didn't have very good experience with nvidia blobs, but at least nvidia cares about KDE and I noticed most of the nvidia users chooses KDE. If os drivers won't be playing good with KDE I'll simply switch to something better. I guess many people will do the same.

[RagingDragon]

I assume Martin has already updated the KWin compositing whitelist to include the new Intel driver. So biggest problem here seems to be that Ubuntu (and perhaps other distributions) are unlikely to provide the KDE update in a timely manner?

Also, drivers lying about their capabilities should be regarded as a critical driver bug. I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect a window manager to handle that gracefully. Again I assume that driver bug was fixed fairly quick, and that what made it a big problem was that Ubuntu (and perhaps other distributions) were unlikely to provide the driver update in a timely manner.

To me, these are just more reasons to prefere rolling release distributions. They get updates and fixes to their users as soon as possible.