Hi! Sorry for the late reply. CCing rpmfusion-developers and full-quoting message, as this discussion is relevant for RPM Fusion. Two eearlier replies to this mail can be found in the freeworld archives and in the attachment: http://livna.org/pipermail/freeworld/2008-July/003115.html http://livna.org/pipermail/freeworld/2008-July/003116.html On 19.07.2008 18:24, Stewart Adam wrote: Some general thoughts: * For the legacy drivers I'd like to see "legacy" in the package name (nvidia-legacy-73xx, nvidia-legacy-96xx), as that makes things like "I'm using legacy stuff that (1) might not support all Features and (2) might be dropped sooner or later" obvious to the user. That is a quite important detail IMHO. On the other hand it has some appeal to use the same scheme for all driver packages (nvidia-71xx, nvidia-96xx, nvidia-173, nvidia-177) * some users in the past asked us to maintain a stable branch that is not updated immediately when nvidia releases a new version * other users always want the latest and greatest; they even asked us to ship beta drivers * some people were unhappy that we used the xorg-x11-drv prefix for our drivers; are those people still unhappy? Should we consider to get rid of that prefix again? * making the driver parallel installable would be really nice for live-media * updates don't work for all the drivers -- users need to restart; we need to find a way to unload the module during X-restart after a nvidia update; that should be easy; fglrx did something like that in the past * I don't like the GUI livna-config-display much at all; cluttered interface and some of the things (like the Xgl stuff) are totally irrelevant for 99,9 % of our users; that needs a major cleanup! So maybe something like this could work to solve some of the problems: * we ship all the driver packages with a versioned name nvidia-73xx, nvidia-96xx, nvidia-173, nvidia-177 * make those packages parallel installable * create a init script/app that chooses the "best" driver on bootup; that app could even have a settings file where the user could say "use beta drivers; prefer 177 series" or something like that; it also could yell thinks like "you have the 173 series of drivers installed but need the legacy drivers from the 96xx series". But that app should never ever call yum, as network might not be accessible during start. A lot of people also dislike if packages get installed behind their back, so we should avoid to do that. * create two meta packages "nvidia-all" and "nvidia" to the repo; "nvidia-all" could track in all the drivers we offer and everything will "just work" -- the easiest solution for ordinary users. "nvidia" could track in the driver that is considered the "standard" one (173 now) and all newer ones (177 right now). That could be the solution for those users that want to avoid useless downloads for the legacy driver. The decision which driver to use would be left up to the init script; * having a GUI app that says "you need nvidia-73xx, nvidia-96xx or nvidia" would be nice. It IMHO should not offer the standard and newest drivers (173, 177), as their meaning and usage might change over time; the script can handle that better, even if that means some useless downloads But that GUI app IMHO should not be specific to nvidia or graphics drivers. It would be way better if it would a bit like the proprietary driver install and configure tool Ubuntu has. Even better: make that app able to suggest and install add-on packages like gstreamer-plugins or xine-lib-extras-monfree for the packages it finds installed on the system; that would be a really cool feature :-) * users that want to avoid useless downloads can just install nvidia-173; they can keep both pieces if it breaks because they tried to be smart and but are not. Of course we use proper obsoletes in newer drivers where it makes sense to not break stuff on purpose ;-) Does that sound like a solution that fixes some of todays and tomorrows problems? CU knurd