On Sun 27 Sep 2026 at 12:44:12 (+0200), Tomasz Wolak wrote: > On 9/26/26 10:49 PM, Frank McCormck wrote: > > On 2026-09-26 16:22, Tomasz Wolak wrote: > > > Do you know if there is any particular reason why mesa-amber > > > drivers (for Xorg) are not present in Debian distributions? > > > (not only in stable, last time I checked no version, not even > > > experimental, has packages with mesa-amber, unless named > > > exotically...) > > > > > > These drivers are available, for instance, in Arch: > > > https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/mesa-amber/ > > > > But in Arch Pacman wants to remove the basic Mesa package to > > install Mesa-amber as they > > are in conflict. > > Well, Arch was just an example, I do not know how they package it, I > just found mesa-amber there... > > Regarding Debian, as I wrote, I have compiled source packages for > Ubuntu on Debian 13 and installed them without any issues/conflicts. > There are lintian warnings and even some errors while building > packages (about packaging for a different distro, what would need > cleaning up for Debian), but it does not seem much of a problem to me, > and it is nothing that prevents using it. It is only matter of > environment (specifying proper libraries/drivers). > > So again - is there a reason not to put it in Debian? (besides maybe > that no one has done that...)
$ apt-file find amber | less includes the line: mesa-common-dev: /usr/share/doc/mesa-common-dev/amber.rst and that file says: Amber Branch ============ After Mesa 21.3, all non-Gallium DRI drivers were removed from the Mesa source-tree. These drivers are still being maintained to some degree, but only on the ``amber`` branch, and only for critical fixes. These drivers include: - Radeon - r200 - i915 - i965 - Nouveau (the DRI driver for NV04-NV20) At the same time, the OpenSWR Gallium driver was removed from the Mesa source-tree, because it was already practically speaking unmaintained and the actively maintained LLVMpipe offers much of the same functionality. Users with Intel GPUs that were using i965 should migrate to either Iris or Crocus, depending on their GPU. These drivers generally speaking both perform better and have more features than i965 had, and due to sharing more code with the rest of the Mesa infrastructure, gets more bug fixes and features. Similarly, users of i915 should migrate to i915g (the Gallium driver for the same hardware), as it's still being maintained. Users who depend on the removed drivers will have to use them built from the Amber branch in order to get updates. Building -------- The Amber branch has some extra logic to be able to coexist with recent Mesa releases without them stepping on each others toes. In order to enable that logic, you need to pass the ``-Damber=true`` flag to Meson. Documentation ------------- On `docs.mesa3d.org <https://docs.mesa3d.org/>`__, we currently only publish the documentation from our main branch. But you can view the documentation for the Amber branch `here <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/tree/amber/docs>`__. I don't know whether that's any help. Cheers, David.
