Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev-announce

From: Jeroen Roovers <jer@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o, gentoo-dev-announce@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev-announce] x11-drivers/xf86-video-openchrome needs a new maintainer
Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:04:37
Message-Id: 20120807152723.75fecb33@marga.jer-c2.orkz.net
1 Hello developers,
2
3
4 for the last few years I have been maintaining
5 x11-drivers/xf86-video-openchrome as best as I could. I was basing most
6 of that work on my extensive use (in a workstation of sorts) of a single
7 VIA EPIA M-10000 mainboard for a period of more than seven years, but it
8 proved increasingly difficult to hang on to it. A bad case of capacitor
9 plague[1] meant that peripheral I/O functions (sound, USB, probably
10 more subsystems I wasn't even trying to use anymore) were becoming
11 increasingly unstable. Lately even booting the system was hit and miss,
12 and its dismal performance paired with having a 1600x1200 screen
13 resolution supported by a /very/ slow frame buffer had me looking for
14 a spiffy alternative. When that opportunity presented itself, I stuffed
15 the single storage device into the new system and ran with it.
16
17 I haven't looked back and I don't think I want to fire up the EPIA
18 again, so I can no longer maintain the graphics driver for it. Most of
19 the work on the VIA graphics drivers used to take place at a separate
20 website [2], but recently most of the work has shifted to
21 freedesktop.org[3]. The OLPC[4] project has a vested interest in
22 getting the open source driver to work, too, which is where former
23 Gentoo developer Daniel Drake[5] does more than his share of the work.
24 The last year or so has seen a lot of work put into getting DRM working
25 properly, and that holds at least some promise for the future of both
26 the hardware and its usability in Linux based systems.
27
28 In the last few years there have been a few occasions where the
29 unstable branch of openchrome ebuilds in the tree wouldn't work at all,
30 and there have even been cases where the stable branch had severe
31 problems that weren't noticed or fixed until I happened to stumble upon
32 them myself. VIA graphics found some use in the middle of the last
33 decade, but I guess most owners gratefully used their spare AGP or PCI
34 slots instead of the built-in graphics, or I would have seen more bug
35 reports, testing and support. The X11 team is now the principal
36 maintainer of these low maintenance ebuilds.
37
38 So, if you have and use the graphics hardware that this driver
39 supports, give it some care.
40
41
42 Happy hacking,
43 jer
44
45
46 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
47 [2] http://www.openchrome.org/
48 [3] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/
49 [4] http://one.laptop.org/
50 [5] http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/