Bumblebee-Project/bumblebee-ppa — pull request #10 by Vincent-C (2013-03-20 09:52:36+00:00)
Title: Proposed changes to PPA packages to merge/minimize diff in Debian/Ubuntu

Hi,

First off, thanks for developing Bumblebee and co., and for maintaining this PPA! :)

I'm currently part of a small team in Debian's nvidia packaging team (mostly me and Aron doing the packaging work), and we would like to package bbswitch + bumblebee + primus in Debian proper. That also means that at some point in the future, Ubuntu will automatically sync our packages during their dev cycle (these packages will probably make it into Ubuntu 13.10 / raring+1)...

Ideally, I'd like to minimize the diff between Debian and Ubuntu as much as possible. This means that:
1) Ubuntu will end up syncing working bumblebee packages, which don't need to be manually patched by Ubuntu MOTU members and/or break Ubuntu systems in combination with the PPA
2) Minimize the amount of code duplication and manual merge work that we in Debian would have to do with each new release (we've based our packaging work on what's currently in the PPA, and we'd like to continue doing so in the future)

It's a win-win for everyone. :)

So with that pre-amble, here's a fairly sizeable pull request for you to consider merging the changes that we've made to the packages, and also a chance for you as upstream to review our changes and berate us if we've accidentally broken something. I've tried to split up the commits as much as possible, and support both Debian and Ubuntu in the packaging. Most of them are trivial changes, but there are a few commits that complicate the packaging a bit (mostly because of the differences in packaging the Nvidia proprietary drivers in Debian and Ubuntu), and also the introduction of a new binary package (primus-nvidia) in order to support both nouveau and nvidia usage with the primus backend (see description in commit for more details).

With all that said, there are a few diffs that still remain, some of which we'll end up carrying permanently, some of which I'm not sure how to merge yet:

- debian/changelog
- Vcs-* links (points to Debian pkg-nvidia repos instead of Github)
- no primus-libs-ia32 - rationale being that multiarch is already well established in both Debian and Ubuntu, and I don't want to carry around a transitional package indefinitely
- primus versioning - PPA version (20120225...) is greater than the Debian version (0~20120225-1). Cannot fix without using an epoch, but we'll have to come up with the same versioning scheme regardless.
- package descriptions - Aron did most of the package descriptions. I'm indifferent to whether we keep his version or we use the current descriptions provided in the PPA.
- dependency on contrib/non-free (i.e. "multiverse" in Ubuntu-land) downgraded to suggests to comply with Debian Policy 2.2. In the end we want people to install bumblebee and primus if they want to use nouveau, and bumblebee-nvidia and primus-nvidia if they want to use proprietary nvidia.

Debian VCS repos can be found here:
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-nvidia/bumblebee.git
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-nvidia/bbswitch.git
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-nvidia/primus.git

Thanks! :)

Vincent