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

[Micah Gersten]

On August 19, 2015 11:21:49 AM CDT, "Stéphane Graber" <stgraber at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>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.

I'd certainly support newer drivers in backports if they don't qualify for SRU for some reason.
Thanks,
Micah