Bug#558393: Please liberate the unstable dependencies to make the packacke installable on stable

[Andreas Beckmann]

On Wednesday, 7. April 2010 09:22:50 Russ Allbery wrote:
> Joachim Zobel <jzobel at heute-morgen.de> writes:
> > This would be consistent with nvidia-glx. It would be helpful for people
> > who need to install nvidia-glx from sid to use never nvidia cards for
> > gaming with wine.
> >
> > It should also be possible without problems.
>
> The dependency is due to the transition from /emul/ia32-linux to /lib32
> that happened during the squeeze development cycle.  This was something of
> a mess and tends to be fragile, and I don't think it's a good idea to
> override the shlibs file of ia32-libs to allow for an earlier dependency.
> I suspect that could break in all sorts of interesting ways, and given the
> number of other issues with the package that need to be sorted out, I
> don't think this is some place where we have resources to work through the
> implications.

The packaging of the nvidia packages has been greatly improved and simplified 
over the last months. Installing/backporting 195.36.31-5 (or a -legacy 
version) to lenny shouldn't be too difficult now. The following restrictions 
apply:

* The *-ia32 packages won't be installable due to the ia32-libs transition.
  This is not going to be changed, cleaning up after the ia32-libs transition 
  is a mess big enough.
  But these packages are usually not needed on amd64 anyway.

* dkms is recommended for building the module. dkms is available in 
  lenny-backports.

* dpkg 1.15 is required by the maintainer scripts. This is not going to 
  change. That version simplifies the work a lot.
  Unfortunately there is currently no backport of dpkg available for lenny.
  But the version from testing can be installed without having to many 
  requirements.

* The Xserver dependencies have been relaxed to be satisfied in lenny, too.

* The kernel module has been compiled successfully with the kernel headers    
  from lenny's kernel. But nobody has actually tested the module so far.

For squeeze the Debian NVIDIA Maintainers Team considers providing backports 
of new upstream releases that are available in unstable/testing for 
squeeze-backports, too.

Andreas