On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:49:36AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote: > 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.
+1, I think this sounds good. I think the benefits outweigh the risk. The risk I see is in wondering what percentage of the install base will end up on it as a result of a game install. If it's large, we run a larger risk of breaking someone in the face of a update regression. Going forward, it there any way some logic can be added to co-install -current and -experimental and do fallback? -Kees -- Kees Cook -- technical-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
