xserver-xorg-video-all requires xserver-xorg-video-ati

[wontfix]

ATi sold to AMD in 2006. I can remove wacom from input but not ATi from video. Are more people running ATi cards in 2022~ than wacom input devices? Why is this still a required dependency?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

"video-all" means it should install all video drivers.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

And yes we do have Ubuntu users with 20 year old hardware.

[wontfix (wontfix)]

I never said it should be removed, only not a required dependency. Input-all apparently doesn't require all input devices. Mach64, MGA, Savage, Neomagic, 3dfx, Trident, SiliconMotion, and ViA can range around that timeframe and are not required by all.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Actually most of those are from the 1990's, 25+ years ago. Up to 20 year old hardware is generally fine for Ubuntu providing it's not an Intel GPU. Intel GPUs unfortunately are relatively new and we can only support those up to about 12 years old.

'video-all' is a meta package so it is absolutely appropriate that it requires other packages.

[wontfix (wontfix)]

The Mach chips in terms of server boards were sold well into the late 00's as a competitor to the Matrox(MGA) G200 chips in that space of which were sold until only a few years ago in fairly standard servers. The Matrox G550 came out in 2005 and their PCIe portfolio is still upgraded and sold to this day for digital signage, of which many devices are running Ubuntu. The Rage Fury Maxx series and Voodoo 5 are explicitly post 2000 and competed against each other and the Geforce series. Nouveau which is included to this day supports the original NV4 TNT. The TNT series came out in 1998.

Silicon Motion chips are still produced and sold to this very day in an M.2 package for 2D output in server and embedded scenarios. The VIA VX900 came out in 2010 (OpenChrome). The NeoMagic NM2380 is post 2000 and was famously used in the Sony VAIO PCG-XG18/19 series. The Savage 2000 wasn't even retail available until mere days before 2000, selling obviously and mostly within that decade block.

There is no rule being followed here in terms of sales or production that has anything to do with actual dates, to be clear.

There is no reason any package above or ATI should be required instead of recommended in terms of packages given that the default is to install recommended packages and even the minimal install will do so.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

> There is no rule being followed here in terms of sales or production that has anything to do with actual dates, to be clear.

If it were up to me then the rule would be whether OpenGL is supported in the associated Mesa and kernel drivers, for modern desktop support. If you follow that rule then I think you will find:

  xserver-xorg-video-ati: Yes
  All others you mention: No

So the distinction between ATI and those other drivers makes sense to me. But that might not be the reason. If you want to discuss the distinction further then please do so with the Xorg developers at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/xorg/-/issues or the Debian packagers at https://www.debian.org/Bugs/

> There is no reason any package above or ATI should be required instead of recommended

There is a very good reason. xserver-xorg-video-all is a metapackage so it would be a bug for it to ever fail to install some other packages. Hence they are required. If you don't want them then it is the 'xserver-xorg-video-all' package that shouldn't be installed, and it is dependencies on xserver-xorg-video-all that you should be seeking to cut.

[wontfix (wontfix)]

> If it were up to me then the rule would be whether OpenGL is supported in the associated Mesa and kernel drivers

Until recently, QEMU/QXL would have been without display drivers by your standard, including LTS releases that will be supported for quite some time still. Given the default targets including new Pis as they come out, that standard would remove entire targets from Ubuntu's purview that are works in progress. Given that Vulkan is becoming a common backend and LLVMPipe exists, how does OpenGL of an unlisted version even make sense? This standard also has changed since you originally said a year based range and subsequently modified it when I posted the actual dates relating to new products and sale ranges.

> xserver-xorg-video-all is a metapackage

Metapackages have both depends and recommends all the time. That is the norm. Both the Intel and QXL X11 packages are recommends of xserver-xorg-video-all, not required dependencies. In fact, even xorg has a recommended package for scalable x fonts.

I am just asking that an old ATI package for a dead company, gets the same treatment as Intel regarding recommended status even though Intel is still alive. Intel still gets pulled in by default. Nothing has changed there. This isn't explicit removal, at all.