https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38032
Bug ID: 38032 Summary: "Broken NVIDIA RandR detected" warning needs improvement Product: Wine Version: 1.7.36 Hardware: x86-64 OS: Linux Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: enhancement Priority: P2 Component: winex11.drv Assignee: wine-bugs@winehq.org Reporter: abolte@systemsaviour.com Distribution: ---
This relates to bug #34348 "Wine xrandr12 failure", which concerns nVidia proprietary drivers not adhering to expected RandR 1.0+ behaviour. Until nVidia addresses the problems preventing Wine from using RandR 1.3 reliably for its intended purpose, Wine warns the user that it is falling back to RandR 1.0 as a workaround. It does this by printing the following warning message very frequently:
"Broken NVIDIA RandR detected, falling back to RandR 1.0. Please consider using the Nouveau driver instead."
(line 488 of dlls/winex11.drv/xrandr.c as of 1.7.36)
The user is reminded of this every time winex11.drv is loaded, which is apparently quite frequently - even for command-line applications. Due to the overuse of the warning, it comes off very strong and may cause unnecessary worry. It may also present annoyances for developers looking through future bug reports that are filled with this message.
I suggest this situation can be improved by the following two proposals:
1. this only be printed the first time winex11.drv is loaded.
2. the message changed to point to a wiki page or man page with a short description of the problem, or even the URL of bug #34348. eg.
"Broken NVIDIA RandR detected, falling back to RandR 1.0. Please refer to http://wiki.winehq.org/RandR"
This would allow users to understand what has happened and decide for themselves what course of action should be taken. Otherwise, I don't think a user will get a sufficient level of understanding from one line of text, and (unlike most Wine output) this one is aimed at the user and not so much at developers debugging something.