Unhappy Xorg upgrade

[vehemens]

On Fri Jan 30 11:53:16 PST 2009, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>As a general note, this is the second time in a row that an X.org
>upgrade broke X for a significant number of people.  IMO, this
>suggests that our approach to X.org upgrades needs significant changes
>(see below).  X11 is a critical component for anyone who is using
>FreeBSD as a desktop and having upgrades fail or come with significant
>POLA violations and regressions for significant numbers of people is
>not acceptable.

The problem isn't so much as a problem with xorg updates as it is with the 
overall port approach.  Not having a stable versus current ports approach is 
probably the biggest cause of the problems seen here.  The port freezes don't 
help either.

In general when upgrading, you take your chances.  If a port upgrade fails, 
you should fall back to what worked.

Trying to partial rebuild ports versus rebuilding from scratch after a major 
update is just asking for problems.

There probably needs to be a more incremental approach when upgrading major 
ports.  For example, I updated my system a piece at a time over the last 
several months, and had no significant problems with the offical x11 upgrade 
as the changes were small.

And last, many of the video drivers have little if any support.  If you have 
something other then ati/intel/nivdia, you should expect problems.  Input 
drivers are in a similar state.