[ubuntu-x] New nvidia experimental driver packages coming soon for 12.04

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 10:18:07AM +0200, Michael Wisheu wrote:
> Hi Bryce,
> 
> How about updating it to 304.51? This is mainly a bugfix release and I
> would recommend it over 304.43.
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-304.51-driver

We actually have looked at that, but we found there's a bug[1] with
304.51 and Unity when the launcher is set to auto-hide (it never
reveals).  This was found by testers of the development release, and we
reverted nvidia-current back to 304.43 as a result.

This is a particular problem for quantal because Unity is enabling
autohide by default, so the bug affects people by default and thus is
quite severe.  For precise, Unity does not auto hide by default, so that
makes it less severe; however precise is also an LTS so stability is
all the more important and known regressions in even non-default
functionality are still worth close scrutiny.

For quantal, we'll be shipping 304.43 as the nvidia-current version.
It's quite stable and received a huge amount of testing, so I think it's
a safe choice.

In quantal, we are including 304.51 as the nvidia-current-updates
version.  It does include some worthwhile bug fixes; still, this is a
bit risky: If precise users have -updates enabled and then upgrade to
quantal, then unity will break for them.  Yet at least there are paths
to work around the bug (by going back to nvidia-current).

I've notified NVIDIA about this bug, and they've confirmed it and are
working on a fix.  So we'll have it out in quantal's
nvidia-current-updates once it becomes available and passes testing.

For precise, it probably makes sense to just skip inclusion of 304.51
for nvidia-current-updates, and wait for the fix.  SRU policy applies
here, and that tends to strongly avoid updating things if there are
known regressions such as we have in this case.

But, many precise users probably don't use Unity's autohide feature and
would like 304.51 to fix other bugs, and don't want to wait for the next
update.  We are shipping it in the x-updates PPA[2], and would encourage
these users to install from there.

Bryce

1:  https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1057000
2:  https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates