nvidia-experimental package with expedited SRU process?
Bryce Harrington
bryce at canonical.com
Fri Aug 31 17:49:36 UTC 2012
AAA commercial games often require fixes and features which at the time
of their release are available only in beta versions of the proprietary
video drivers. To support getting these games available on Ubuntu
swiftly, we would like to make these beta drivers available to users of
12.04 and future stable releases.
Currently we provide updates via the nvidia-current-updates package.
This was established for providing better hardware support, and has been
demonstrated to be effective and appreciated by users. We could be
faster (see my other proposal) but otherwise it's a good process, and a
good model for us to follow here.
I think -updates should continue focusing on providing stable,
_released_ drivers. For the beta drivers, we could add a third package,
nvidia-experimental, which would be used when needed by specific games.
-experimental would be marketed as "bleeding edge / unstable" but would
be provisioned in much the same way as -updates. We would like to
commit to an objective of a 3-day turn around from when the driver
becomes available to when it is officially available for users to
install.
Would the tech board be open to allowing this specific package to follow
an expedited SRU process?
How I'm thinking it'd work in practice is, we would package and upload
the driver to -proposed and file a minimal SRU bug report (basically
just the Impact section; we're unlikely to know details). We'd then
have the game vendor verify the driver from -proposed works with their
game. The SRU admin would then be able to wave it through at that
point.
Bryce
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