nvidia-experimental package with expedited SRU process?

[Kees Cook]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:49:36AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> 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.

+1, I think this sounds good. I think the benefits outweigh the risk.

The risk I see is in wondering what percentage of the install base will
end up on it as a result of a game install. If it's large, we run a
larger risk of breaking someone in the face of a update regression.

Going forward, it there any way some logic can be added to co-install
-current and -experimental and do fallback?

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook