Requested Moratorium on hard to build dependency bumps for KDE 5

[Martin Gräßlin]

 On Tue, 7 Jun 2011 17:51:32 +1200, Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> 
 wrote:
>> It should not affect the runtime requirements for X11, but if Mesa 
>> 7.11 gets released before our 4.8 dependency freeze, we have to depend 
>> on it.
>
> Can you please clarify what you mean by we *have* to depend on it?
> Does this mean which of the following:
> * CMake level check making KWin completely unavailable to people
> without Mesa 7.11
> * Runtime level check making all compositing unavailable to people
> without Mesa 7.11 - regardless of whether it is X or Wayland
> * Runtime level check only concerning Wayland
 None of those: Runtime check for users of Mesa with GLX. There is no 
 check for Mesa with EGL or for users of NVIDIA or ATI blob. Though there 
 are features not available on any of the drivers in any of the 
 hardware/driver version combination
>
> Either of options 1 and 2 are completely unacceptable under any
> circumstances - considering that people who will be developing for 
> 4.8
> will be doing so under distributions which ship 4.7 - which will
> probably only have Mesa 7.10.
 With the current manpower and the shaky graphics stack around us we are 
 not able to support more than one Mesa version. As the distributions are 
 going to ship Mesa 7.11 together with 4.8 there is no way that we can 
 continue to guarantee a working stack with Mesa 7.10, therefore we have 
 to raise the requirement. The same I expect for 4.9 and so on.

 If someone wants to disagree on that, I want to see the increased 
 manpower in KWin. Until that happens, it is a mood point to discuss it, 
 as it is denying the reality.
>
> Compositing alters the way the window system operates and can expose
> bugs - and by imposing these dependencies you are inhibiting the
> ability of other developers to triage and fix bugs or other defects.
 We need bug reports for the latest Mesa release, not for the last. 
 Nobody cares about the last release. We need *now* developers testing 
 4.7 with Mesa 7.11 as it might be that distributions will put those 
 together and not the Mesa 7.10 we require.

 Cheers
 Martin