> Is there any validation process in place before
> releases? It seems to me that even tough it is important to
> have functionality like this working perfectly, current
> hardware is moving away from optical drives and this may not
> be tested extensively before a release.

To my knowledge we have no validation or quality assurance plan before a release. I have raised the topic several times (check the archives). Once upon a time I started a wiki article to create a basic testing check list.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/wiki/bin/view/Developers/PackageBuildQA

David has raised such topics too. Mostly, because of the small number of people involved, the discussions fizzle rapidly. :(

With that said, recently we tested TDEHWLIB in depth. A summary of issues I found are available in bug report 850, Comment 4.

http://bugs.trinitydesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=850

Please add to the bug report should you perform any testing.

I can get TDEHW to work quite well but only when I set /usr/bin/eject suid. I haven't figured out why that is needed or why HAL based systems do not need that. So yes, more work is needed before announcing TDEHW in any official manner, but I believe the new hardware layer is more advanced that most non GIT users would know.

Darrell