Why is 3D acceleration with nouveau so much discouraged?

Question

From nouveau wiki:
Any 3-D functionality that might exist is still unsupported. Do not ask for instructions to try it.
From archwiki:
If you want to try 3D acceleration or you have problems with it, you are on your own, unless you are looking to contribute patches.
Ok I get that nvidia has a very good proprietary driver for linux, while others like ati dont, so an open-source 3d accel driver for ati is very much important. But shouldnt nvidia cards also have a opensourced driver so that distros can include them in the default install without violating several legal issues? Other than the warnings that I quoted, even bug reporting for the nouveau gallium3d drivers is prohibited. In Fedora 13 just a single 2mb package(something like mesa-dri-experimental) enables gallium3d, and I have had no issues with that, but in arch a lot of packages(some are huge) have to downloaded/compiled to get gallium3d to work. Also no howtos/wiki page to install gallium3d for nvidia.
Without people actually using and testing them how do we get them to be perfect(or even near perfect)?

Answer 1

Soumyadeep wrote:Without people actually using and testing them how do we get them to be perfect(or even near perfect)?
This question would only make sense if the devs thought that their code works.  They don't, although it's getting better.
In fact, I'm glad they discourage use, because my latest experience (2 weeks ago) with nouveau 3D is that running 2 glxgears windows at the same time hangs the entire kernel and nothing but a hard reset will fix it (no magic SysRq, ssh, etc.).  If people started using nouveau 3D, they'd probably be annoyed at losing everything they're working on every few hours.
Apparently though, stability and functionality vary a lot between chipsets, so you may as well try it if you want.  But if it doesn't work, don't bother telling the devs -- they already know.