On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 1:39 AM, Rémy Oudompheng <remyoudompheng@gmail.com> wrote:
2011/3/31 Det <nimetonmaili@gmail.com>:
Not to keep bugging your mailboxes but I suppose the only real reasons for keeping all those nvidia-specific-kernel packages in the AUR boils down to these:
1) The user wants to install an Nvidia driver for a non-booted kernel, yet he doesn't want to install the driver for any the other kernels since the rest (or at least 1 of them) use Nouveau or similar.
2) The maintainer wants to show a link to his unofficial repository containing a precompiled version of his package.
If these are enough to keep all that nvidia* stuff in the AUR then I don't mind. It'd just be nice, if somebody came up with a PKGBUILD that would ask the user which of the installed kernels he wanted the nvidia driver to be installed to. In addition the package could hold a simple text file listing all the unofficial repositories for using the precompiled packages instead or something ^^.
I am absolutely against replacing "reproducible" PKGBUILDs (those which do not generate variables on-the-fly and can be built in clean chroots and installed with predictable results) with "non-reproducible" PKGBUILDs (those which require user interaction, or use backquotes constructs to modify their source array or $pkgver).
For me the latter category of PKGBUILDs are only convenience solutions (that are sometimes created to work around AUR limitations). They are certainly useful, and most of time welcome in the AUR, but will never in my mind replace true PKGBUILDs that correspond to deterministic and well-defined packages.
A package should only be deleted if it is irrevocably broken or if a package exists that provide the same functionality *at the same level of reproducibility and predictability*.
Rémy.
I agree with the concept. However, in your opinion does nvidia-beta-all fall under non-reproducible? It does different things on different machines, but entirely in a non-interactive way. In case you don't want to bother to take a look at the PKGBUILD (I wouldn't), here's the basic thing it does:- 1. grep through files in /boot/ to find installed kernels 2. compile the NVIDIA driver for those kernels It cannot be compiled in a chroot (unless the requisite kernels are available), but it seems to satisfy the rest of your criteria. The discussion may be moot, however, since I just searched through the AUR for nvidia and noticed most of said packages still have maintainers (did not check whether they were out-of-date). No problem, then. I could possibly simply add white/black-listing to the PKGBUILD to cater for those who want nouveau on specific systems (though AFAIK this would require symlinking of libgl...). I hate PKGBUILDs which interactively ask for anything, there should be a sane default non-interactive behaviour, but also simple tweakables.