Adding a hook to ubuntu-drivers GUI for a driver PPA

[Stéphane Graber]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 02:13:16PM -0400, Jorge O. Castro wrote:
> Hello tech board,
> 
> It is my understanding that most of you are either at DebConf or
> LinuxConf, so I thought I'd start the conversation via mail, here's
> the context: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2015-August/004693.html
> 
> A bunch of us have organized and are now publishing the drivers at
> ppa:~graphics-driver. While this will help advanced users by
> consolidating third party PPAs into one more organized one, it doesn't
> so much for the new user who is experiencing this new world of gaming
> on Linux. Two out of the three contributors to this PPA are well-known
> and trusted Ubuntu developers with years of contributions to Ubuntu.
> 
> I wanted to ensure that we got feedback from game developers
> themselves, which is why we asked Feral and Aspyr to leave their
> feedback directly. The thought is, if we can make Ubuntu rock for
> these guys, then the rest of us get the benefit of that work.
> 
> I'd like to propose the following:
> 
> - An additional entry in the graphics driver dialog that says
> something similar to "The latest upstream driver from Nvidia), this
> selection would never be the default.
> - The user accepts a way to acknowledge that these things are a
> community best effort and are provided as-is, with no expectations of
> support.
> 
> We would then update the PPA according to Nvidia's upstream release
> schedule.  I realize that this request is pretty much the antithesis
> of everything we know about shipping a well supported desktop
> operating system, so I'd like to kick off with some of my reasoning:
> 
> - The rate of first class AAA game titles for Linux is increasing, and
> a great deal of those games are requiring the latest drivers.
> - There is a bunch of things happening in the gaming space, like the
> Vulkan API and VR, which will mean that  this space will probably
> start to rev faster, not slow down.
> - SteamOS is for console OEMs. For desktops and laptops, Valve tells
> people to use Ubuntu.
> - The demand for these drivers will cause people to do things to get
> them, including xorg-edgers, manually installing drivers (which is a
> terrible user experience),
> 
> Looking forward to the discussions, thanks for your time!

I'm personally -1 on this.

Ubuntu SRU rules specifically allow newer versions of such packages to
be uploaded to the supported Ubuntu archive when needed for hardware
enablement or fixing bugs, which it sounds like would match your use
case perfectly.

Furthermore, all Ubuntu flavours must be built entirely from the Ubuntu
archive and current policy (and one that I think makes sense) is that
packages aren't allowed to add external (to the Ubuntu project)
repositories.

Adding such an option would lead to a repository which people would
assume is somewhat "supported" by Ubuntu in the sense that should there
be negative interactions between that repository and archive packages,
people will file those bugs on Launchpad and may not be very happy when
we mark them all Invalid as they're running "unsupported software".


So I'd very much rather you go through the normal process for this which
is to SRU those newer drivers as needed. If a driver doesn't fit the
existing SRU rules for hardware enablement and bugfixing, you should
still be able ot get it into the backports pocket, all of which uses the
official Ubuntu archive infrastructure.

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com
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