Plenty of work ahead [LWN.net]

Plenty of work ahead

Posted Dec 3, 2007 15:01 UTC (Mon) by alankila (subscriber, #47141)
In reply to: Plenty of work ahead by jwb
Parent article: The first ATI r5xx/6xx X11 driver release

Also remember that if you do not have the HEAD revision of the software compiled, then you
can't even test any fixes. So you not only do not know for sure whether the bug still exists,
you also can't tell whether its fixed by any changes made.

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Actually it's possible

Posted Dec 3, 2007 15:48 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Someone must do the following work:
1. Compile driver with some fixes just for you.
2. Package it for particular distribution - usually including distribution-specific patches
3. Send this binary to you and explain how to use it
4. Repeat the process starting from 1.
WAAAY to much work to do this for free. There are companies which will offer this level of support - but usually it's quite expensive. You should pay one way or another: either by buying expensive support contract or wasting sizable amount of time playing with HEAD drivers...

It's still better then situation in Windows world where you can only submit bugreport and hope that someone sometime will read it and you'll get your fix half-year later...