On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 06:32:10PM +0000, Alan Bartlett wrote:
> 
> "It seems jdow has screwed up."
> 


I am not buying this. I shall bite the hand that feeds me and elaborate.

Look at it from my side.

As a small part of my job, I manage 20-30 machines with random ATI and NVIDIA video cards.

I love ELREPO and I install the nvidia drivers the usual way:
yum install elrepo-release;
yum install nvidia-driver-blah;
reboot, everything works great.

Then on a nice sunny day, I read the post by jdow about elrepo having pushed
out drivers with support for her video card removed, and she is clearly unhappy
about it (who would be happy?).

Well, bad things happen to good people, could happen even to me, right?

But wait, it did happen to me just now. These new drivers have been pushed
into every one of my computers! Some of them have a supported video card, some not,
but in any case, now I have to deal with this, happy or not.

So where is here my fault, where is here jdow's fault? We did not do anything
and our computers are broken now and we have to spend time fixing them.

Before assigning the blame, let me list the evident problems:

1) "yum install elrepo-release" enables automatic updates from the repository,
   so any updated packages will be installed automatically. (elrepo-release-6-5.el6,
   [elrepo] "enabled=1").

2) nvidia removes support for some video cards from their driver

3) nvidia and elrepo make a mess of the information on which cards are supported by which drivers.
   Quickly, GeForce210 is supported by which driver? Hint: http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia
   does not have a link to a list of supported cards.

4) elrepo pushes out the new driver under the old name, messing up all the "unlucky" machines.

5) elrepo tells us "but you should have followed our mailing lists and converted
   those machine to the legacy driver, we gave you N days to do so!"
   (even if you are on vacation, or busy with another project, or have the affected
    machines in inaccessible locations).

Without assigning blame, I can suggest some solutions:

a) "yum install elrepo-release" should have automatic updates disabled, for nvidia drivers
   or for all packages (through yum-autoupdate magic, through "enabled=0", whatever).

b) elrepo should have used a different name for the new incompatible driver (kmod-nvidia-310).

c) elrepo should add a big warning "any future update of this driver may remove support for your video card,
   please follow our mailing lists closely" in http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia.

As it stands now, I cannot even tell from the available documentation which driver
I should be using for the GeForce210 cards I have on most machines.

What a mess.


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada