On Thu, 1 Jan 2009 13:28:55 -0500
"Michael P. Soulier" <msoul...@digitaltorque.ca> wrote:
> Your philosophy seems to put an undue amount of work on the
> administrator.
I guess I'm in the camp that thinks the administrator should know what
modules are needed for the hardware, and portage should keep working as
it does now.
ISTM the fundamental cause of the problem is with nVidia. Their
different series of drivers support different hardware, but instead of
distinguishing them by different package names, they only use version
numbers. It looks like they now offer four different series,
supporting four different hardware sets (with some overlap of the sets).
IMO the best solution would be to regard the four series as four
distinct software products and give them different names. So, e.g., if
you had installed x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers173-173.14.14, emerge -u
wouldn't install x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers177-177.82. And people
like me, whose hardware would be supported by both packages, could
just choose which one they wanted (without having to mask anything),
which doesn't seem like too much of a burden.
Or I guess slotting could work also, but probably create
collision headaches for maintainers.
--
»Q«
Kleeneness is next to Gödelness.
