[ubuntu-x] Proprietary driver ABI handling

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

Hey all

As a part of the drive to Xserver 1.10, I've noticed that the fglrx and
nvidia proprietary drivers don't have the appropriate Depends: to
prevent the X server being updated from underneath them. (nvidia bug: LP
#616214, no existing fglrx bug)

A simple fix would be to add ${xviddriver:Depends} to their dependency
fields, which will add a dependency on the current Xserver video ABI
metapackage.  This is sub-optimal in two ways:
1) We need to do a mock “rebuild” against each new Xserver ABI
2) It makes checking Xserver bugs against older ABIs unnecessarily
difficult.

Since the proprietary drivers support multiple server ABIs, I suggest
that we keep a list of these in the packaging and add a dependency
satisfied by any of the appropriate xserver-xorg-video ABIs.

This has the advantage that the default “forgot to update” failure mode
is that an upgrade fails with unresolved dependencies rather than a
broken X, and less work at Xserver upgrade time.

It has the disadvantage that we need to maintain a list of supported
ABIs, and we need to produce the dependency field outside of the xsfbs
helper system, so they could get out of sync.  I don't think these are
big disadvantages, as the supported ABI list changes approximately once
per cycle, and the xsfbs system changes even less often (and we'd need
to deliberately update when it does anyway).

Thoughts?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 490 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-x/attachments/20110131/3dfd8e31/attachment.pgp>