Reasons for this big Xorg mess

Hi

I am a long time Linux user (Debian testing being my distro of choice). My laptop, with an Intel graphics accelerator (Intel 855GM), worked perfectly Hardware acceleration worked - could play foobilliard and other heavy OpenGL games, etc. Then one fine day, as is my wont, I upgraded my Xorg packages (got no bug reports - must have upgraded the day these got into testing), etc. Things have been horrible since - DRI does not work like it used to, and for a while (until I discovered the fix at forced to use the ultra slow VESA driver in my xorg.conf (with no ability to present stuff from my laptop, etc.). Now, after that fix and compiling a new kernel (the fixed xorg core package complained about a version mismatch between i915 kernel driver and xorg), I thought I was home free. But glxinfo showed up the following problem :

ERROR! sizeof(I830DRIRec) does not match pbutted size from device driver libGL warning: 3D driver returned no fbconfigs. libGL error: InitDriver failed libGL error: reverting to (slow) indirect rendering display: :0 screen: 0 direct rendering: No server glx vendor string: SGI server glx version string: 1.2

Apparently, this is also a serious bug arising from a mismatch between xorg and mesa libraries (which in turn need drm) :

The solutions specified therein involve getting CVS versions of drm and mesa. I do not mind compiling stuff (which I am doing right now) but all this mess points at a major chickenup somewhere along the line. I have a few questions - not that I personally want answers to these, but I think that these answers would be important for the future of Xorg. Some of these are Debian specific :

1. Didn't the faulty versions spend enough time in Debian unstable for these problems to get flagged and hence get stopped from getting into testing ? 2. Are Xorg and Mesa developed completely independently of each other ? 3. Now, Intel 855GM and other Intel graphics cards are fairly ubiquitous pieces of hardware - not some obscure undocumented hardware that just came on the market. I have no idea about the numbers, but judging from price compebreastion from Nvidia and ATI, one would imagine that these must form a majority or at the very least, an unignorable significant fraction of all laptops out there. Most damningly, the previous versions of Xorg and mesa worked with this graphics chip. Then how in the world did such a mess come to be ?

I am sure there are more disturbing questions that could be raised but I have gotten a little curious about what is going on, given the mess this has caused.

I am sure that Xorg developers work very hard and Xorg 7 is a major advance, but the old maxim of "First, do no harm". Its not a purely Debian issue as I have seen people using other distros fall into this as well - and the fact that a CVS source code is supposed to fix this, means that the the problem (or at least a good part of it) definitely lies upstream.

Thoughts invited.