I think the package nvidia-settings should probably be built for all architectures, even if there's no prospect of a working driver.
See this: https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=mate-sensors-applet&suite=sid It's failing to build on most architectures because nvidia-settings is not available. Obviously one could make mate-sensors-applet depend on nvidia-settings only on certain architectures, but then you'd have (at least) two packages that need to be updated whenever a new architecture gets a driver. If nvidia-settings were to be built on all architectures then it would only be necessary to update nvidia-settings when there's a change and other packages could safely depend on it unconditionally. I'm assuming that nvidia-settings would be buildable and installable without the driver and that there's a sensible way for it to report "no driver" at run time. On the other hand, I've never used either package so I might be talking rubbish...
