Comment 47 for bug 130325

Well this got more complicated... apparently this patch has gone upstream, and is required to make a few new things function. I was skimming the update/patch logs. This patch was removed early July (13th-ish?) and reinstated the 15th "fixed" no specific mentions of nvidia, but it was removed for some compiz issues, and re-added when the compiz issues were supposedly gone. Now this is interesting... short term, we could sort of weigh the options and maybe remove the patch from the build cycle, long term (next release) if this isn't fixed and we get the new upstream with this patch without it being fixed, it's far more annoying. So this is just getting rather crazy... Now when other peopel start using this patch, or start using the new upstream all applicable distros will see it, and no way it'd go unpatched for long. But it comes down to this:

It seems like in fixing a bug on our end, we exposed a great nvidia end bug... We could work aroudn this more properly, or we could leave it in the main distro tree to try and pressure nvidia to fix it (they really have no reason to listen, in all honesty)

I'm sure nVidia would eventually fix their end of it. But until then... heres what we can do:
1) if the options are weighed in the favor of Compiz support (realistically, almost everyone uses some form of compositing with ubuntu these days, if they can, it's just so easy for light effects to be done) then we will patch this back out of upstream/remove the current patch from the build tree, and there we go.

2) We decide that we shouldn't have to work around somethign we believe to be nvidia end in a grand stance against closed source software! (Sure it'll work well, nvidia will find the err in their ways, and whathaveyou, of course they will) Then I would recommend someone who knows X well to build a semi-official or 3rd party package to fix this (build it without the patch) and distribute it in some repository, and make it accessible, seems like something that might be fit for trevs Gutsy repo (getting in to the whole of package semantics later on)

Honestly, It's a big thing to just say "No we won't do things hackishly for you Mr. nVidia!" to essentially break use of Compiz with anything remotely useful in gutsy final.

Does anyone have the guts to tell people, specifically new users, that because of politics (mainly anywho), they will have to compile a copy of xserver themselves, or uninstall the current and replace it with an off named X which will crap out their metas, and so on. That's a lot to say!

I know it's not *only* politics, the patch was commited for a reason, but there we have it. X crashing Vs. a few things working properly otherwise (from what I hear about the patch, don't quote me on that.)