Re: New xorg-updates branch pushed

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> I've pushed a new branch 'xorg-updates' which updates almost every
> package in xorg.scm, as well as mesa, dbus, glib, pixman, cairo,
> poppler, inkscape, and a few others.
>
> My original purpose was to apply security fixes mentioned here:
>
>   http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Security/Advisory-2014-12-09/
>
> but I decided it was a better use of my time to upgrade xorg-server to
> the latest pre-release (which contains the fixes) than to try to
> backport them to our old xorg-server.  This required updating the *proto
> packages, which in turn forced a rebuild of the X libraries and
> everything built on them, so I decided I might as well update most of
> xorg.scm while I was at it.

Excellent!

> I've been running with these patches on my own system for the last day
> or so, and it's working very well so far.  The X server now uses
> xf86-input-evdev, which among other things enables hotplugging of input
> devices.  xf86-video-modesetting also now works.  I was also able to
> resurrect xf86-video-geode, thanks to a new upstream release.
>
> Two drivers no longer compile: xf86-video-ast and xf86-video-newport.
> They both try to include xaa.h, which has apparently been removed from
> the server, although I confess I didn't look too deeply into it.

OK.

> Most of the commits are fairly straightforward, but I wanted to call
> attention to a few points:
>
> * Wherever possible, I changed the source URIs to
>   mirror://xorg/individual/.  For most of the package updates this was
>   required, and then for consistency, in the final commit I changed all
>   of the URIs for the packages I didn't update.  I made it the last
>   commit so it will be easy to remove if there are objections :)

This is a good initiative IMO.

> * Many video drivers needed patches.  Most of the patches are for two
>   recurrent problems:
>
>    * mibstore.h has been removed in the X server, and 10 of the video
>      drivers haven't yet been updated.  Fixing this requires patches
>      like this:
>
>      
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/patches/xf86-video-nv-remove-mibstore.patch?h=xorg-updates
>
>    * There's an incompatibility between glibc-2.20 and the os.h header
>      in the xorg-server package.  Until they fix this properly, a
>      simple workaround is to include <xorg-server.h> before including
>      the headers for the internal X driver API, as done here:
>
>      
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/patches/xf86-video-intel-glibc-2.20.patch?h=xorg-updates
>
>    * Related to the problem above, some video drivers checked for the
>      exa.h header in their configure scripts, and the test compilation
>      fails for the same reason as above.  My workaround was to hack the
>      configure script to include <xorg-server.h> in the test program,
>      using patches like this:
>
>      
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/patches/xf86-video-mach64-glibc-2.20.patch?h=xorg-updates

Woow, congratulations for handling all those glitches!

> I've asked Hydra to build this new branch, and when it's done building
> (or close to it) I plan to merge it into master.
>
> In the meantime, if anyone feels inspired to review these 116 commits,
> your comments and suggestions are welcome.  Testing would also be very
> helpful, as I was only able to test on my Libreboot X60 laptop with
> intel graphics.

I’ve been meaning to test it on my laptop (“intel” driver), but that’s a
lot of rebuild, and I have gotten there yet.

Thanks a lot for taking care of this.  I hope we’ll find out what’s
going on with Hydra so it can start building it for good.

Ludo’.