Bug#715398: please add a bbswitch-source package

[Vincent Cheng]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 3:53 PM, David Kalnischkies
<kalnischkies+debian at gmail.com> wrote:

> In that case the dependency of bumblebee needs a:
>  bbswitch-dkms | bbswitch-source
> and bumblebee-nvidia needs to accept m-a compiled nvidia modules.
> That would be something like: | nvidia-kernel-319.32   (and all the others).
> But I am not sure why you are listing each and every possible module here,
> why not "just" a big nvidia-kernel-{legacy-{173xx,96xx}}-{dkms,source} or-
> group (plus whatever ubuntu might call the packages maybe).

>From my understanding of Ubuntu's nvidia packaging (from cursory looks
at Launchpad, and a few conversations with upstream bumblebee devs),
src:nvidia-graphics-drivers on Ubuntu builds very few binary packages,
with everything dumped inside, and there's no separation into -dkms or
-source binary packages [1]. That leaves me with the choice to either
depend on meta/transitional packages (I think it's currently called
"nvidia-current", but there's also nvidia-experimental,
nvidia-current-updates, etc.), or depend on all possible modules, or
both (which is what is currently done in bumblebee).

The main reason why I've listed each and every possible module is the
fact that upstream has done it this way in their Ubuntu PPA for years
now, and it works for them. Given that I don't really understand the
current state of nvidia packaging in Ubuntu, I may as well err on the
side of caution and just do it their way.

As for Debian, I think the same approach would be even more brittle,
as the modules include the full version in the package name, so the
equivalent of depending on nvidia-304 (Ubuntu) would be to depend on
nvidia-kernel-304.88 in Debian...so everytime Andreas makes an update,
I would have to as well. However, I see that Debian offers
nvidia-kernel-{amd64,486,686-pae} packages as well; Andreas, would it
be safe to depend on these rather than each individual module?

I've committed my proposed changes to git [2].

Regards,
Vincent

[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-319
(which produces binary packages nvidia-319 and nvidia-319-dev)
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-nvidia/bumblebee.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian/control;h=e4769ae390b71e495ec18c143f35d1a16a6b682f;hb=HEAD