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

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, August 19, 2015 09:21:49 AM Stéphane Graber 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.

+1 to Stéphane's -1.  This has come up before and I think his response is 
entirely correct.  "Because games" is not a good reason to throw all this out.

Scott K