X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

> Wasn't one of the points of R7 that the distribution is modularized, to the
> point where it would make sense to ignore the overall version, and ship 7.1
> except with a switch for a 7.0-with-nVidia/ATI server? Gentoo, at least,
> ought to be able to have proprietary drivers limit the server version,
> although I don't think portage is actually quite nifty enough yet to figure
> out what that means.

In fact, Gentoo does exactly that, although it doesn't generally come up in discussions. All of the headers, libraries, etc are the same, and when we talk about 7.0 vs 7.1 being stable, all we really mean is server+drivers.

You're correct about the binary driver requiring a certain server version -- it doesn't yet work as seamlessly as one would wish. One proposal suggests that the binary driver package install a file masking the newer server and drivers, to make this work a bit better.