autobuilding src:nvidia-* [non-free]

Philipp Kern pkern at debian.org
Mon Aug 6 17:03:16 UTC 2012


On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 06:49:11PM +0200, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> On 2012-08-06 17:07, Philipp Kern wrote:
> > I gathered. That doesn't answer my point, though. It is the *last* package
> > in the archive doing so, instead of using dkms.
> There is nvidia-kernel-dkms, too. But for historic reasons we always
> provided prebuilt modules for stable and I don't want to change this.

Copying debian-release@ and debian-kernel@ on what they think. To provide
context (it seems that pkg-nvidia-devel@ dropped my mails or put it into a
queue, hence they're not in a list archive): nvidia-graphics-modules seems to
be the last package to provide pre-built kernel modules. Do we still want this
for wheezy given the maintenance hassle if there's an ABI bump? Or is an ABI
bump (e.g. through a security update) completely unlikely for wheezy, given
that we managed to keep squeeze stable?

> > It does mean that it needs to be updated on every kernel ABI bump.
> Right, but that hopefully does not happen too often for stable (but the
> next ABI bump is already scheduled, as I heard).
> 
> > (Also in theory the ABI compatibility
> > guarantee of the Debian Linux packages is that they can add new symbols at any
> > time, they just won't drop old ones. But I guess that's not as relevant for the
> > nvidia packages.
> I recently needed to rebuild it for 3.2.0-3 again because of mismatching
> symbol versioning without ABI-bump (#683365), that should be doable by a
> plain binNMU in the future.

It could at least be compatible one-way by specifying strict dependencies onto
the package it was compiled against. But if kernel upgrades randomly break it,
that concerns me even more and somehow points to it being unsuitable as a
mechanism for a stable distribution. Yes, we could possibly update the modules
through a stable update at point release time (or maybe through
stable-updates), but if there's already a solution that solves it: Why
shouldn't we use it?

Kind regards
Philipp Kern
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