Re: nvidia drivers -- advantages of packages v. commercial download

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 2:54 PM, George Galt <[email protected]> wrote:
> All:
>
> I've found building the latest nvidia drivers (310) a very interesting
> intellectual challenge, and, fortunately, I currently have the time to do
> it.  However, in the near future I anticipate a lot less free time.
>
> I've never gone the route of simply using nVidia's installer directly, so I
> don't know what challenges/difficulties it holds; but it got me thinking
> about what are the advantages of using the nVidia drivers packaged by Axel
> (or Paulo of late) over the nVidia installer.
>
> Can anyone enlighten me?

I can try :)

This isn't specific to ATRPMs (disclaimer: I maintain the akmods
service package at RPM Fusion) but one advantage I can think of is not
having to trust the nvidia people to not bork your system. Packages
built at both ATRPMs and RPM Fusion are done on a build server in a
chroot and packaged into an RPM where yum/rpm makes sure they get
installed, and more importantly uninstalled, correctly.

For programs I use that are not available in repositories I still
build packages even if I'm the only user. Rpmbuild and rpmlint help
make sure you do things the right way and catch obvious and sometimes
not so obvious problems. Also, this way I never have to trust the
"make uninstall" part of an upstream project.

Richard