Description of problem: [davidz@daxter ~]$ rpm -q xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.0.99.902-1 [davidz@daxter ~]$ rpm -q --requires xorg-x11-server-Xorg |grep xorg-x11-drivers xorg-x11-drivers >= 0.99.2-4 From the ChangeLog, it seems this dependecy was introduced here * Fri Nov 25 2005 Mike A. Harris <mharris> 0.99.2-9 - Added "Requires: xorg-x11-drivers >= 0.99.2-4" as a dependency of the Xorg subpackage, to ensure that anaconda installs all of the drivers during OS installs and upgrades, as requested by Jeremy Katz. and while this is convenient for the installer team there are other ways to solve those problems. Right now it breaks in particular for OLPC which is to be based on Fedora, and in general it's certainly doesn't help make Fedora a good choice for any other embedded project. Please remove the dependency on xorg-x11-drivers. Thanks.
So, we should break things for the core users of Fedora for OLPC? That seems like cutting off our nose to spite our face. The problems are 1) On fresh installs, we need to (by default at least) install all X drivers so that people can change out their hardware and not get screwed. 2) On upgrades, we need to ensure that any X drivers which in the future get split (eg, think of a future world where radeon and old-school ati aren't in the same driver since they really aren't the same code and so could/should be maintained separately) And this needs to be done outside of anaconda so that people using other mechanisms will have things work too. One possible approach is to snip the requires from xorg-x11-server-Xorg -> xorg-x11-drivers. And then we continue for the general case to have xorg-x11-drivers, but in specific cases, people can not install it/remove it. I think that would solve the OLPC case and it should also be doable for handling the more general case.
> So, we should break things for the core users of Fedora for OLPC? > That seems like cutting off our nose to spite our face. Why do you think I want to break it for core users of Fedora. > 1) On fresh installs, we need to (by default at least) install all X > drivers so that people can change out their hardware and not get > screwed. So anaconda would pull in both xorg-x11-server-Xorg and xorg-x11-drivers. > 2) On upgrades, we need to ensure that any X drivers which in the > future get split (eg, think of a future world where radeon and > old-school ati aren't in the same driver since they really aren't > the same code and so could/should be maintained separately) One solution: if you want to split out xorg-x11-drv-i810 into xorg-x11-drv-i810 xorg-x11-drv-i915 you simply add a Requires: xorg-x11-drv-i915 to xorg-x11-drivers and make xorg-x11-drv-i810 Conflict: with the old xorg-x11-drivers. Then on updates of xorg-x11-drv-i810 the new xorg-x11-drivers will be pulled in and that pulls in xorg-x11-drv-i915. I'm sure there are other ways. > One possible approach is to snip the requires from xorg-x11-server-Xorg > -> xorg-x11-drivers. Uhm, that's what I suggestion in the Summary of this bug. X team : What are your thoughts about this? Thanks.
I have mixed thoughts. On the one hand, for standard desktop and server platforms, including enthusiasts and hobbyists, we have always installed all of the video and input drivers in every release of every OS product we have ever made. The total hard disk space consumed by the drivers is negligible on all modern systems, and the benefits of having them all installed all the time make our installer and configuration tools much simpler. However, this does not take into consideration the needs of embedded systems such as OLPC. If it is a mandatory requirement, then we have to make the change I guess, and anaconda and the rest of our tools will need to be updated in FC6 to deal with this. I've commented out the dependency on xorg-x11-drivers in xorg-x11-server in FC6 now, and it is building in beehive.