lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 04:22:21PM +0100, o jordan wrote:
> I don't see any value in rolling back to A-3 or even rolling back
> specific packages (e.g. the xserver radeon driver which is the change
> that did it) to A-3.

It's entirely unrealistic anyway over such a long time period.
Individual packages over a relatively short time period, sure, if they
are known to be the cause; the entire X stack (given that alpha-3's
Radeon driver package was for a different version of the X server with
an incompatible ABI) across two months, not so much!

Reverting changes that cause regressions is sensible in many cases.  But
the point of it is to get us back to a more stable state, not to spend
ages undoing an enormous amount of work and take us into a new
substantially-different combination of software that nobody has ever
tested before.

> PowerPC can install fine.  It can install fine on radeon.  It just
> needs a yaboot parameter applying.  It is how to comunicate this
> information to the user that is the problem.  People just don't read
> information that is given to them.

It's long been a guiding principle of Ubuntu that users shouldn't have
to set boot parameters by hand.  If you've got to the point of
identifying which specific package version change is responsible, it
might not be so much harder to narrow it down to a particular
(presumably upstream) change, so that the X team can arrange for this to
work by default.

> But, honestly, it is a really easy
> problem to overcome and I don't think a big deal needs to be made of
> it. I'm much more interested in getting things like
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-cdimage/+bug/1051313 and

Applied, thanks.

> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1043066 fixed.

I've applied the patch to yaboot-installer and uploaded, but it may be
too late for beta-2 and it will need a separate ubiquity upload as well
in any event.

> The problem is with the changes that have been made
> to the xserver-xorg-video-radeon package this config now drops you
> into 8 bit graphics (forcing you this time to use a yaboot parameter).
> What is happening is that the radeon xorg driver detects drm is
> unavailable and unloads itself and the fbdev diver is used instead
> (for some reason this defaults to 8 bit).  This didn't used to happen.
> You could certainly ask the question if it is possible to have KMS
> without drm?  Not being a graphics expert, I don't know if that is a
> stupid question or not.

The right answer, then, is to ask a graphics expert. :-)  Try #ubuntu-x.

> I can't explain it any clearer.  Unless you can have KMS without drm,
> then the only choice is do you remove radeonfb for 12.10 or not.
> Either way, the boot message on the CDs needs to be updated and the
> timer removed so that people have a chance to read the new message.

As I tried to explain on IRC, I'm extremely wary of updating the boot
message until I have acknowledgement from the X team (or kernel team if
necessary) that there's no other way.  Boot messages that explain that
people have to set boot parameters are not something we like to do if at
all possible.

>  Does non-PowerPC Lubuntu suffer from this bug?  Basically a previously installed Lubuntu is labelled as Ubuntu in grub/yaboot: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/os-prober/+bug/950914

I've followed up to this bug.  But, in short, it has existed in some
form since the very first Ubuntu flavour was created in 5.04, and there
is no good reason to consider it any more important now than it was
then.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx]