Steve Grubb wrote:
On Tuesday 05 September 2006 09:02, Pasha R wrote:
I don't think it is a good idea, distribution-wise. If you ever upgade your graphic card, you will get a non-working system.
Then I wonder what the point was to splitting them up? I was one who thought this would be a great time to jettison all the old video card drivers. Like when would you ever install a Tseng video card? Or S3? And if you did, won't the Vesa drivers work well enough until you install a more optimized driver?
The point of splitting them up, was to allow individual drivers to be updated alone, to make maintenance of the driver packages simpler. It was also to minimize the disk space usage on FTP servers and mirror sites and network bandwidth usage consumed on those sites, and on RHN et al. when a single driver needs to be updated.
To be very clear, never at any point in the decision to have individual driver rpms, was it to allow people to uninstall drivers they didn't want or need (or didn't think they wanted or needed), nor was it to reduce or enable the user to reduce the amount of disk space used by an OS installation.
The total disk space used by all X drivers combined is extremely small, both in terms of megabytes, and in terms of dollars of disk space. Small enough on the scale of care, to be totally negligible.