[elrepo] RE driver update incompatibility issue

[Lamar Owen]

On 01/30/2013 09:08 AM, Phil Perry wrote:
> We could create a set of dummy packages specific for hardware classes. 
> For example,
>
> nvidia-6xxx
> nvidia-7xxx
> ...
> etc
>
> and then somehow figure out a way to get the correct hardware-specific 
> dummy package onto users systems (that's the tricky part).
>
> The logic then being that when the v310 driver was released and 
> dropped support for 6xxx and 7xxx series cards, we could have added a 
> Conflicts against those packages, so if users had one of those 
> packages installed specific to their hardware then that would prevent 
> yum automatically updating the nvidia driver to a version no longer 
> supported by the installed hardware.
>
> In terms of Provides and Requires, it could be as simple as each of 
> the above hardware-specific dummy packages contains a virtual Provides 
> for nvidia-hardware-compat, and the latest nvidia driver Requires 
> nvidia-hardware-compat and Conflicts with the hardware-specific 
> individual packages that are no longer supported. Again, the tricky 
> part is getting the right hardware-specific dummy package installed on 
> an end-user system. 

I personally like this option the best.  Translating from pci vendor and 
device id's to a package name should be fairly easy to script, given the 
pci ids.

The corner case here, which for an enthusiast system might not be a 
corner case, is 'what happens when I change my hardware, and how easy 
will it be to get to the correct driver version with the least pain?'

But this should fix the driver update issue pretty cleanly.  As you say 
elsewhere in the thread, if it were just kernel modules it wouldn't be 
quite so difficult, but multiple versions of statically linked libraries 
is a pretty significant complication to throw in to a system where 
simplicity is best.  I shudder to think about that, and I have thought 
about it before, back when I was maintaining the PostgreSQL packages.

Of course, now that I know a 'replace' plugin is available, I'll use 
that, in the rare instance it's needed.  Like when I get the $$$ to 
upgrade video cards..... :-)