User interaction problems

[Martin Gräßlin]

----- Ursprüngliche Mitteilung -----
> On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 10:23 PM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org>
> wrote:
> > On Saturday 30 April 2011 22:04:12 Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > > OpenSUSE 11.3 (which KWin claims is insufficient
> > > in terms of it's Mesa version) isn't even 9 months old.
> > > 
> > > Please take steps to improve the user experience.
> > And here we have a conflict of possibilities. Mesa developers want us
> > to drop support for older drivers so that we can have a more secure
> > way of checking the capabilities without getting broken by the drivers
> > if they do changes. Now you ask us to improve the user experience by
> > again relying on possibly broken checks. We cannot support old and
> > modern drivers at the same time - at least it looks like that.
> 
> Note that I didn't ask for support for Mesa 7.9 or earlier. What I
> asked for is that your configuration ui makes it explicit that
> Compositing is unavailable due to Mesa being too old.
KWin has never provided information like that for cases like software rasterizer being used or crashers when activating KWin. In fact compositing is in all such cases possible through XRender. Some issues like e.g. Software Rasterizer being used or Mesa being outdated can only be discovered when actually using the driver and is by that not available to the config module.

Kwin could show a notification which does not help as the user would never be able to see it. And as explained in my previous mail users will not hit the problem: all modern distributions ship mesa 7.10 and we will communicate in the release note and also to the distributions that KWin requires Mesa 7.10. 
> The only reason
> I knew is because I grepped ~/.xsession-errors.
Which is totally fine as you are an experienced user.
> 
> I know people do in-place upgrades of their KDE installations - they
> will run right into this.
They won't. Either they are experienced and compile by themselves or use distro packages which will know about the increased requirement.
> 
> > 
> > No current distribution is shipping less than Mesa 7.10 and the change
> > is for KWin 4.7 which will be only used by either current
> > distributions or the next distribution releases, e.g. OpenSUSE 12.0.
> > 
> > I am sorry to say that we are not able to fullfill your wish. It is
> > unlikely that a "user" will face such an issue. We will clearly
> > communicate in our release notes that KWin 4.7 will require Mesa 7.10.
> > A developer has no problem with lack of notification as we print out a
> > debug statement.
> > 
> > Cheers
> > Martin
> 
> Regards,
> Ben