On August 19, 2015 11:21:49 AM CDT, "Stéphane Graber" <[email protected]> wrote: >On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 02:13:16PM -0400, Jorge O. Castro wrote: >> Hello tech board, >> >> It is my understanding that most of you are either at DebConf or >> LinuxConf, so I thought I'd start the conversation via mail, here's >> the context: >https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2015-August/004693.html >> >> A bunch of us have organized and are now publishing the drivers at >> ppa:~graphics-driver. While this will help advanced users by >> consolidating third party PPAs into one more organized one, it >doesn't >> so much for the new user who is experiencing this new world of gaming >> on Linux. Two out of the three contributors to this PPA are >well-known >> and trusted Ubuntu developers with years of contributions to Ubuntu. >> >> I wanted to ensure that we got feedback from game developers >> themselves, which is why we asked Feral and Aspyr to leave their >> feedback directly. The thought is, if we can make Ubuntu rock for >> these guys, then the rest of us get the benefit of that work. >> >> I'd like to propose the following: >> >> - An additional entry in the graphics driver dialog that says >> something similar to "The latest upstream driver from Nvidia), this >> selection would never be the default. >> - The user accepts a way to acknowledge that these things are a >> community best effort and are provided as-is, with no expectations of >> support. >> >> We would then update the PPA according to Nvidia's upstream release >> schedule. I realize that this request is pretty much the antithesis >> of everything we know about shipping a well supported desktop >> operating system, so I'd like to kick off with some of my reasoning: >> >> - The rate of first class AAA game titles for Linux is increasing, >and >> a great deal of those games are requiring the latest drivers. >> - There is a bunch of things happening in the gaming space, like the >> Vulkan API and VR, which will mean that this space will probably >> start to rev faster, not slow down. >> - SteamOS is for console OEMs. For desktops and laptops, Valve tells >> people to use Ubuntu. >> - The demand for these drivers will cause people to do things to get >> them, including xorg-edgers, manually installing drivers (which is a >> terrible user experience), >> >> Looking forward to the discussions, thanks for your time! > >I'm personally -1 on this. > >Ubuntu SRU rules specifically allow newer versions of such packages to >be uploaded to the supported Ubuntu archive when needed for hardware >enablement or fixing bugs, which it sounds like would match your use >case perfectly. > >Furthermore, all Ubuntu flavours must be built entirely from the Ubuntu >archive and current policy (and one that I think makes sense) is that >packages aren't allowed to add external (to the Ubuntu project) >repositories. > >Adding such an option would lead to a repository which people would >assume is somewhat "supported" by Ubuntu in the sense that should there >be negative interactions between that repository and archive packages, >people will file those bugs on Launchpad and may not be very happy when >we mark them all Invalid as they're running "unsupported software". > > >So I'd very much rather you go through the normal process for this >which >is to SRU those newer drivers as needed. If a driver doesn't fit the >existing SRU rules for hardware enablement and bugfixing, you should >still be able ot get it into the backports pocket, all of which uses >the >official Ubuntu archive infrastructure.
I'd certainly support newer drivers in backports if they don't qualify for SRU for some reason. Thanks, Micah -- technical-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
