Bug#603878: nvidia-graphics-drivers: various issues upgrading from lenny's nvidia-*-legacy-96xx

[Michael Gilbert]

package: nvidia-graphics-drivers
version: 195.36.24-4
severity: grave

Hi,

After the call for upgrade testing, I just did a lenny-to-squeeze
test on an old system of mine. The nvidia-*-legacy-96xx kernel module
and glx were installed under lenny (to support an old nvidia card that
none of the newer nvidia drivers support). I followed the upgrade
instructions exactly at [0].

After installing the new kernel and udev and rebooting (section 4.5.5),
X was nonworking (since it was using the new kernel and I hadn't built
a new module).  So I had to boot into single user mode to complete the
rest of the install.

During the dist-upgrade (section 4.5.6), a lot of xorg drivers and
xorg itself ended up getting removed.  After the dist-upgrade, I
manually installed xorg, which removed nvidia-glx-legacy-96xx.  After
that X still wouldn't work since I still had the old nvidia-based
xorg.conf.  I removed /etc/X11/xorg.conf and installed
xserver-xorg-nvidia, which fixed all of the problems.

So, I think this could be fixed by either providing an upgrade path
from the legacy drivers to nouveau or by simply telling the user to
remove nvidia-*-legacy-* packages and /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the release
notes.

Setting the severity at grave since this caused all kinds of upgrade
breakage (that a less technically apt user would have a lot of trouble
with), but I will deffer to your judgment on the severity since its so
late in the release process.

Thanks,
Mike

[0]
http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html