[pkg-nvidia-devel] The NVIDIA packages and squeeze

[Russ Allbery]

Hello release team,

First, let me apologize for how long it's taken me to write this message
(and to get the packages into a position to write this message, since much
of the upload bottleneck and investigation has been blocking on me).  This
is way late in the process to be writing a message like this, and I know
that's not what you'd like to see.  I'm very sorry for that.

I've talked to a few members of the release team about this upcoming
request from around the time of DebConf, but this is the first formal
request for review of the NVIDIA non-free packages for squeeze.

Some of you probably remember that early this year all the NVIDIA packages
were in fairly dire shape, with many RC bugs in each package.  Since then,
we've put together a new maintenance team, done a ton of bug triage,
completely overhauled the packaging to make it much more supportable and
hopefully to play well with other packages going forward, and fixed
multiple long-standing structural problems with how the packages were put
together.  The following packages are now in a place where I consider them
releasable and suitable for evaluation for squeeze:

    nvidia-graphics-drivers 195.36.31-3
    nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-173xx 173.14.27-1
    nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-96xx 96.43.18-1
    nvidia-graphics-modules 195.36.31+1

The first two have older versions in squeeze right now which are partway
through the package restructuring.  However, they're not the versions that
we'd we'd rather release with squeeze.  The major changes relative to the
versions in squeeze are:

* New upstream releases which fix bugs in video card support and which
  haven't shown any new problems in unstable over the past month.

* An overhaul of how the complex diversions are handled by the package by
  moving them all into separate packages, which can be used by all the
  versions of NVIDIA drivers.  These packages also add support for
  alternatives to the package, which right now allow the user to switch
  between the MESA libGL and the NVIDIA libGL (and which now lay the
  groundwork for better co-existence with free drivers and with fglrx).
  The new handling should be much more robust; there are problems with
  package purging and the like that we know are now fixed.

* Separation of the libGL libraries from the X server driver, which
  addresses long-standing problems with using the NVIDIA packages with a
  chroot where you don't or can't install the kernel headers or an X
  server.

* Fixing bugs in the shlibs-generated dependencies for packages built on a
  system while nvidia-glx is installed.

* Lots of cleanup and more careful handling of problems caused by old
  manually-installed NVIDIA packages and various weird things done by old
  versions of the Debian packages, which has been one of our biggest
  sources of package bugs.

nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-173xx also fixes RC bug #588590.

Installing the current unstable versions cleans up quite a bit, from
package names to proper separation between packages to various library
link issues, and we'd really like to get all that cleanup into the archive
for squeeze users so that we don't have to maintain the multiple sanity
checks and transitional packages through the next release cycle.

All the legacy packages are now built on the same generic packaging as the
main package, which ensures that they all operate in the same way and play
well with each other.  Also, all the legacy packages just depend on the
diversion handling packages provided by the main package, so we don't have
to maintain multiple copies of the complicated diversion handling.

nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-96xx was removed entirely from testing due
to RC bugs.  The new version fixes all of those RC bugs and completely
rewrites the packaging based on the current packaging details.  It also
adds DKMS support.

nvidia-graphics-modules is the build package for pre-build kernel modules
for the release kernel.  It was also removed from testing because it was
targetted at very obsolete kernels.  It's not strictly necessary, since
the packages now support DKMS, but it's a nice convenience to have for
users, and it's very difficult for this package to introduce any new
problems (since it's a light wrapper around nvidia-kernel-source).

As you might imagine from the above, with all those changes, this
unfortunately isn't a very reviewable diff.  :/  It's substantial
restructuring and improvement, plus new upstream releases of non-free
pre-built binary packages.  The timing on this is obviously horrible; if
this had been finished two months ago, that would be much better.

How would you like to proceed with this?  Is there more information that I
can provide?  Obviously, a long age time in unstable is both very
reasonable and a good idea for as long as we have time for the aging.  The
packages are leaf packages so shouldn't block or complicate any transition
and shouldn't be able to break anything other than themselves.

Note that both nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-173xx and
nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-96xx require nvidia-graphics-drivers to
migrate as well, since they use the new diversion and alternative handling
packages.

(nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-71xx apparently doesn't work with the
current X.org server even in the latest version released by upstream, so
it looks like we're going to have to release squeeze without it.  It's not
included in this request.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>