Thought I'd take a break from the Xrandr GUI blogging to make mention of a few new (and old) tools I put together for the Xorg bug swat team.
First up is a new high level Ubuntu-X Status Page, updated several times an hour. This was directly inspired by Leann Ogasawara's Ubuntu Development Weather Report tool, but is focused one level down on just Xorg stuff.
This has been a handy tool for reviewing and accessing various "targets of opportunity" lists that others maintain, like Daniel's sponsoring and 'really-fix-it' pages, and Brian's handy 'bugs with more than 5 subscribers' pages, along with the usual milestone and release targeted bug lists in launchpad.
One thing this highlights is that our -ati driver needs a lot more bug triager attention, as there are quite a few serious bugs plaguing users (note the large number of subscribers).
Anyway, the tool is still a bit crude, but it's been useful to me. I'm hoping to develop it a bit further in Intrepid.
Next up is an older tool I've mentioned, the Launchpad Bug Graphs. I don't know if anyone else uses it, but I use it daily.
The 6-month view of the -intel X driver Open Bugs shows the great progress we've made with the Intel bug stats. I'd set as a goal for Hardy to reduce it to below 100, and after quite a bit of work, this was achieved! Of course, 100 bugs in -intel is still concerning, and I hope with Ubuntu community member's help we can continue pushing this down.
I think -ati could benefit from a similar intense focus; while the total raw number of bugs has not grown significantly since last release, the numbers are higher than they've been for as long as we've been graphing them, which is troublesome given that we're about to finalize an LTS. We could really use some serious help here, so if you're an ATI user looking for a way to really help Ubuntu, this could be it.
The next tool to show off is extremely new, and in fact is really just a static prototype, but has already been proven useful. I'm calling it the Historical Ubuntu Xorg Intel Drivers page, but that doesn't really roll off the tongue. Anyway, it's essentially a series of git snapshots of Xorg's upstream Intel driver, pre-built for hardy-i386.
There is a certain class of bugs I've noticed, where the user reports that the issue worked in Gutsy or an earlier Alpha, but currently is broken, and this tool is designed to assist in narrowing this down. The user identifies a "known good" and a "known bad" entry in the table and then "bisects", picking a deb halfway between them, and tests that. Then, depending on whether that failed or not, they pick one halfway between it and one of the original two, and so on until they identify the two adjacent versions between which it fails.
I didn't build every single git commit, since that would be a bit overwhelming. I skipped every several commits, figuring that once it's down to about 4-8 patches then a developer ought to be able to pick out the most likely candidate. I hope this will help enable non-technical Ubuntu folk to do much of the legwork in isolating regressions, without needing to break out a compiler or spend a lot of time on it. (As a side benefit, this gives them a way to upgrade or downgrade to a working driver if worse comes to worse.)
When I get more time I plan on enhancing this tool with debs for more releases, for amd64, and for the -ati and -nv drivers, and maybe -radeon if there's sufficient interest. We'll see how it works.
Okay, last tool. Well, documentation actually... This is the Ubuntu X page on the Ubuntu wiki. I've linked in tons of other useful stuff here, and in particular would like to highlight the X Debugging Handbook, which I've recently broken up into separate pages for easier reading. Through the Hardy bug fixing period I've added a good bit to the Troubleshooting page, to document steps one can take for figuring out various classes of problems. It's not quite to the paint-by-numbers level that I hope to get it to, but getting close.
That's a very well done website there with the graphs. Pretty cool.