Bug#747837: nvidia-settings: upload to main

[Vincent Cheng]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 6:45 PM, Michael Gilbert <mgilbert at debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 9:32 PM, Vincent Cheng wrote:
>> AFAIK, this package is in contrib because nvidia-settings is useless
>> without the proprietary nvidia driver installed (nvidia-settings
>> certainly doesn't work with nouveau), which satisfies the definition
>> of "contrib" as per Policy 2.2.2.
>
> Chromium uses libxnvctrl to query whether or not the NV-CONTROL
> extension is available, so it isn't entirely useless without the
> proprietary driver's presence.

>From an user's perspective, if I "apt-get install nvidia-settings" and
it doesn't bring in a set of proprietary nvidia packages as
dependencies, then I can justifiably say nvidia-settings is RC-buggy
because nvidia-settings is broken and useless in such a scenario.
Hence it must depend on nvidia-driver | nvidia-glx |
nvidia-alternative (or whatever the correct metapackage is), but
that's not possible if nvidia-settings were to be moved to main.

The only possible solution I can think of is for Andreas to distribute
nvidia-settings as two separate source packages, e.g. src:libxnvctrl
in main that builds the shared lib and dev packages, and
src:nvidia-settings in contrib that builds nvidia-settings. I can
however attest to the fact that splitting a source package in this
manner (the same way I did with conky and conky-all) is annoying and
is more work, so I'd understand if Andreas refuses to do so and tags
this bug wontfix.

Anyways, Andreas is the maintainer of nvidia-settings, not me, so it's
probably a better idea to wait for him to chime in.

Regards,
Vincent