Add "recommended" flag to driver info

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli]

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareAndUpdatesSettings#drivers:
"Below the device name should be a caption reflecting this state: “This device is using the recommended driver.”, “This device is using a manually-installed driver.”, “This device is using an alternative driver.”, or “This device is not working.”."

so, if each driver can have the status of "recommended", "alternative" status, we will be able to define the overall status for the device.

It would be nice to have this status ENUM returned by detect.system_driver_packages()

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Please note that the u-drivers API can only make some guesswork about "recommended" for the various proprietary nvidia driver versions (-96, -173, and -current). For nouveau vs. nvidia, or ati vs. fglrx there is no real recommendation, as they both have different strengths and weaknesses.

I don't know what an "alternative" driver should mean, this needs clarification from design.

I can work out whether there is a manually installed driver up to some degree of reliability.

As for "not working", and to some degree "alternative driver", the API can return a boolean flag about "if this driver is not installed, there will be a free driver taking over", which would be true for nvidia/fglrx, and false for bcmwl. Would that satisfy the requirement?

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

All looks good to me :)

You last:
"the API can return a boolean flag about "if this driver is not installed, there will be a free driver taking over", which would be true for nvidia/fglrx, and false for bcmwl."
This can address bug #1025323 without adding any new API. I guess this will be sweet (despite duplicated info of model and vendor. :)

About the heuristic for "Graphical drivers", "Wifi drivers", I dont' see a nice and easy way to implement it, any idea?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Someone in the UDS session complained that I was using green for proprietary and yellow for open source, as if an open source driver was always worse. Fair point. So I ended up with this work item:

[mpt] Change color-coding so that green = whichever driver was tested with the Ubuntu release <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareAndUpdatesSettings?action=diff&rev2=13&rev1=12>: DONE

So, that's how the "recommended" and "alternative" wording came about. By "alternative" I was referring to anything other than the recommended one.

If we don't know enough to have a recommended driver in each situation, that's fine, but we need to have some other understandable way of presenting the choice.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I'll use this bug for the two new flags (recommended and manual_install) in the driver info, and will use bug 1025323 for the grouping by device (instead of driver) and adding the free alternatives.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Thinking about this again, the "manual install" flag does not make sense here, as system_driver_packages() _only_ lists driver packages. Whether they come from Ubuntu or third-party is already covered by the from_distro flag. So the "manual install" flag will only appear in the by-device grouping from bug 1025323.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

https://github.com/tseliot/ubuntu-drivers-common/commit/16d0a47464f0b44b8eba1db42f9d9b80e0d01f83

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-drivers-common - 1:0.2.65

---------------
ubuntu-drivers-common (1:0.2.65) quantal; urgency=low

  * UbuntuDrivers/detect.py, system_driver_packages(): Add 'recommended' flag
    to the nvidia-* and fglrx-* packages, which usually provide more than one
    package for a particular device. (LP: #1025315)
  * UbuntuDrivers/detect.py, auto_install_filter(): Filter out non-recommended
    packages, to avoid installing multiple versions of the NVidia or FGLRX
    driver.
  * UbuntuDrivers/detect.py: Change return value of detect_plugin_packages()
    to a plugin_name → [package, ...] map, so that we retain the plugin names.
  * UbuntuDrivers/detect.py: Add system_device_drivers() API to get a
    by-device view of drivers, plus OS builtin free alternatives (such as
    Nouveau). Add it to README as well. (LP: #1025323)
  * ubuntu-drivers: Add "device" command to show by-device drivers as reported
    by system_device_drivers().
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:48:44 +0200