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

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Jorge,

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 02:13:16PM -0400, Jorge O. Castro wrote:
> 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!

Have you had any discussions with members of the SRU team about this
already?

It sounds to me like you are concerned that the package updates you describe
would not be allowed in the main Ubuntu archive.  I don't think that's a
foregone conclusion.  I think it's entirely consistent with our policy of
hardware enablement SRUs to make something like this available in Ubuntu,
provided that there's someone to maintain it.

What I would not be willing to sign off on in your specific proposal is
presenting an archive to our users that's outside the control of the Ubuntu
archive team and the Ubuntu developers in general.  Any archive that Ubuntu
is offering to install packages from should be under Ubuntu governance, and
not via a third-party ppa.  The ~graphics-drivers team in Launchpad
includes several people, including yourself, who are not in the Ubuntu
developers team.  The right way to get packages from this team to be
presented automatically to developers is by getting the team members into
ubuntu-dev, not by bypassing the DMB process.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/attachments/20150819/3fcbb10d/attachment.pgp>