AAA commercial games often require fixes and features which at the time of their release are available only in beta versions of the proprietary video drivers. To support getting these games available on Ubuntu swiftly, we would like to make these beta drivers available to users of 12.04 and future stable releases.
Currently we provide updates via the nvidia-current-updates package. This was established for providing better hardware support, and has been demonstrated to be effective and appreciated by users. We could be faster (see my other proposal) but otherwise it's a good process, and a good model for us to follow here. I think -updates should continue focusing on providing stable, _released_ drivers. For the beta drivers, we could add a third package, nvidia-experimental, which would be used when needed by specific games. -experimental would be marketed as "bleeding edge / unstable" but would be provisioned in much the same way as -updates. We would like to commit to an objective of a 3-day turn around from when the driver becomes available to when it is officially available for users to install. Would the tech board be open to allowing this specific package to follow an expedited SRU process? How I'm thinking it'd work in practice is, we would package and upload the driver to -proposed and file a minimal SRU bug report (basically just the Impact section; we're unlikely to know details). We'd then have the game vendor verify the driver from -proposed works with their game. The SRU admin would then be able to wave it through at that point. Bryce -- technical-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
