Comment 63 for bug 130325

(I am going to make this my last comment on this bug)

Maintaining two xorg packages would crank maintenance issues up dramatically and if it came to this I suspect a 3rd party would have to maintain the alternate xorg because doing so doesn't carry all the commitments of Ubuntu doing it (e.g. security updates).

I also think that arguing against the patch completely on the grounds of NVIDIA card popularity is the wrong way to go (I noticed some previous comments were tending to this). Yes NVIDIA cards ARE common but the patch fixes issues for Intel graphics card owners too. Approximately 40% of x86 PCs are shipped with Intel graphics cards in them. The rest of the market is split fairly evenly between NVIDIA and ATI cards and some small percentage are other graphics card makers (VIA, Matrox, SiS etc). See http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070730-nvidia-continues-to-take-graphics-market-share-from-amd-intel.html for the current estimates of the big three current percentage shipments. Note this comment refers to total graphics cards shipped - not just discrete cards.

My one thought in this is if an updated NVIDIA binary driver is released, how will it know which ABI it should target? Doesn't the current xorg indicate that it is the old ABI (which it isn't strictly true)? Obviously changing the ABI version will cause issues today (you would need to set the NVIDIA binary only driver to ignore the ABI) but would it go on to help things in the future?