After installing xorg-server on my amd64, i had the following news to read. The mesage is very confusing. The message generation should be conditionnal, and depend on the arch, or, explicitely state it talks about the arch architecture by Digital. Many message of this kind usually mean "if you are using the alpha version of our software, then ... bla bla bla". And those are usually designed for x86; and they just say "if you are using alpha, then please report problems to our team". And it just means "alpha software version, the one before beta". I always scratch my head when reading messages telling about "alpha". "recent versions of X11 on an alpha" is specially confusing; it could mean "recent versions in the alpha branch of X" (maybe, the coming 1.7 ? who knows). I am pretty sure the generation of this message can be conditionnal, and, not appear on non Alpha computers, thus, avoiding the confusion to 98% of Gentoo users. And even for Alpha users, explicitely state "Alpha computers by Digital". Thanks. uranus init.d # eselect news read 1 2009-07-12-xorg-74-alpha Title xorg-x11-7.4 and xorg-server-1.5 kernel support Author Tobias Klausmann <klausman@gentoo.org> Posted 2009-07-12 Revision 1 Recent versions of xorg's X11 require kernel support to access PCI and AGP graphic cards. This support has only recently been added to the Linux kernel (sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-2.6.30 and sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.29-r5). Thus, you will need to run a recent enough kernel to use recent versions of X11 on an alpha. If you only start programs on your alpha, but the display is on another machine, no upgrade is necessary. Furthermore, not all graphics card drivers have been updated to work with the newer X server API. One example is the glint driver used for Permedia cards. The upstream developers have been informed about this, but no fixes are available yet, please see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21546 For a general guide to upgrading to Xorg 1.5, see the Gentoo upgrade guide: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/x/x11/xorg-server-1.5-upgrade-guide.xml uranus init.d #
The eselect news format doesn't allow us to restrict the news like we would like, but we realized it after it was committed. Now that 1.6 is stable, there's not much point to fix it @alpha, if you guys want/care to make changes (if any), go ahead. If not, feel free to close it. Thanks
The problem is not about Alpha arch, but, for all non Alpha users :) Isn't the $ARCH accessible from the ebuild ? I am not a dev, so, i have no clue. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=2&chap=1 if ${ARCH} == "alpha" or == "~alpha" then ewarn foobar else don't bother other users The message would be more helpfull if: - it stated explicitely it is telling about the Alpha ARCHITECTURES - it gave the exact SYMBOLS required in the kernel; this would be very helpfull (as Alpha user, about to re-install a Gentoo soon, i will need to build X and a kernel, so, in a few weeks, i may face this problem) I don't intend for removal of message, but make it better explicit, and conditionnal :)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 277619 ***
