review request for the debconf templates used by the nvidia graphics driver [non-free]

[Andreas Beckmann]

[dropping debian-l10n-english@, lets continue discussing on
pkg-nvidia-devel@]

On 2012-07-10 17:30, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>>> By the way, what configuration interferes that this purge avoids?  It
>>> sounds like a bug.
>>
>> /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-kernel-common.conf: blacklist nouveau
>>
>> Patches welcome :-)
> 
> Would putting the file in /lib/modprobe.d be acceptable?  (See
> /usr/share/doc/kmod/changelog.gz.)

Ideally there should be some kind of "switch" to disable nvidia and
re-enable nouveau without removing/purging any package. That would have
applications in live-cds etc. that have different drivers installed and
some clever hardware detection that enables "the best".
Co-installability of nvidia, nvidia-legacy-* and fglrx along with the
free drivers is nearly there and alternatives can be used to switch
between them (mainly between their libGL.so.1 implementation). Except
for module blacklists that are installed statically and need manual
editing or purging.
And kernel modules for different variants that all use the same name:
  nvidia, nvidia-legacy-*: nvidia.ko
  fglrx, fglrx-legacy (ITPed), fglrx-firepro (not packaged): fglrx.ko
(fglrx-legacy-legacy just appeared as a beta a few days ago, a driver
for radeon hd 2000/3000/4000 series that works with Xserver 1.12 (the
regular fglrx-driver release 12-6 which added support for Xserver 1.12
dropped support for these cards) - I hope to get this into wheezy, but
it won't be co-installable with fglrx-driver and it's not expected to be
usable in wheezy+1 due to missing X support - nvidia instead maintains
their legacy drivers for a longer time, although I'll finally phase out
96xx and 71xx for wheezy+1)

How does kmod handle symlinks in /etc/modprobe.d or /lib/modprobe.d that
point somewhere outside?
* copy the file (then we can use a slave alternative)
* create a dangling symlink (then we can't because we need to get the
blacklist into the initrd)
* fail?


Andreas