User interaction problems

[Martin Gräßlin]

 On Sun, 01 May 2011 22:46:50 -0700, Ryan Rix <ry at n.rix.si> wrote:
> On Sat 30 April 2011 14:36:02 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
>> ----- 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 Software Rasterizer being used or Mesa being outdated can only be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.
>
> Hmmm, that's unfortunate. Fedora 14 won't get kde-workspace 4.7 then,
> it looks
> like, since it's stuck on mesa 7.9 for the forseeable future. :( Six
> months !=
> modern, I suppose...?
 This is now a little bit surprising for me as it was a Fedora developer 
 who urged me into raising the requirements. In fact I was even asked to 
 raise it for the next minor release as a bugfix.

 If you think that the kde-workspaces need to support more than one 
 driver, please explain it to the Mesa developers and why we need hacks 
 to identify specific driver versions and why such hacks my not be broken 
 by minor releases of drivers. The driver developers made it very clear 
 that they expect us to only support the latest drivers and remove all 
 hacks to support old drivers.

 Cheers
 Martin