Comment 2 for bug 1050674

A. That's an interesting scenario. Under such a situation the user would be left on a functional Ubuntu install, but the game would not work. Several options come to mind for addressing it, but none seem perfect:
   1. Move them to nvidia-current anyway. There will always be an equal or newer version of the experimental driver in newer releases, so we ignore the breakage and let the user manually re-install experimental after upgrade.
   2. update-manager could warn the user of this case and let them decide whether to proceed with the upgrade. update-manager is what will be switching them to the nvidia-current driver so (handwavy, sorry!) could include logic to compare versions.
   3. update-manager could conditionally keep them on experimental if they have a newer version installed than the new nvidia-current would provide.

In ideal circumstances #3 would give the best user experience since it should keep their game working. But it exposes them to significant risk; who knows what bugs may exist in the new beta driver. #1 avoids this risk but breaks their game. #2 passes the buck by making the user decide.

B. Currently, the games that we're looking at for this will present the user with a dialog that they need to install the driver via Additional Drivers. It won't be pulling the driver in automatically as a dependency. So the user should be aware that they've installed a driver, and should look to addressing that to restore their system. Ideally that just means going to Additional Drivers and switching back. But this may involve running apport-cli if the breakage involves X not starting, or even utilizing a failsafe session in particularly severe cases. Obviously all bad user experiences, but (for better or worse), they're all well trodden paths and we have tools, documentation, and processes to help. Obviously our goal will be to minimize this happening.

C. Regarding two games requiring different beta drivers, historically NVIDIA does not put out two different major beta drivers in parallel. So by the time game B comes out, the prior beta that game A needed will have been released as a stable driver. Game B's beta driver can be expected to provide whatever game A required, so after it's installed both games should work fine. The user will have both installed but only the newer one enabled. On the off chance that game A *doesn't* work with the newer beta driver, the user would then toggle between the two in Additional Drivers. That would be obviously annoying and hopefully never crop up in practice.

D. That's correct, we're using the quantal major version as practice and to stage the SRU. We anticipate 304.48 will go into nvidia-updates eventually, and are mainly taking advantage of it to seed the processes, so that when a real beta driver appears we can hopefully move it through the system faster (our stated goal is 3 days from upstream release for it to appear in the LTS).