obsolete drivers list may be out of date

[Brian Murray]

ubuntu-drivers-common provides a file named obsolete which is presumably a list of obsolete nvidia drivers. It doesn't seem to have been updated recently:

 $ ls -lh /usr/share/ubuntu-drivers-common/obsolete
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 162 Jun 24 2011 /usr/share/ubuntu-drivers-common/obsolete
[ 3:30PM 10459 ] [ bdmurray@impulse:/tmp/dist-upgrader ]
 $ cat /usr/share/ubuntu-drivers-common/obsolete
nvidia-glx
nvidia-glx-new
nvidia-glx-legacy
nvidia-glx-envy
nvidia-glx-new-envy
nvidia-glx-legacy-envy
nvidia-glx-177
nvidia-glx-71
nvidia-glx-190
nvidia-glx-195

Does it in fact need updating?

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

Yes, the file hasn't been updated in a while. Thanks for reminding me.

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

After a second look, I think that hack was only needed for very old releases, upgrades should go smoothly without the entries in that file now.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Could you add some information about what leads you to believe that so I can make an informed decision about ripping the list and code which checks it out of ubuntu-release-upgrader?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

We should investigate ubuntu-release-upgrader to see if the code which utilizes the obsolete driver list can be removed from it.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

From what I can tell DistUpgradeCache.py calls NvidiaDetection, provided by nvidiadetector.py from , and passes the ubuntu-drivers-obsolete.pkgs as an argument. It looks like the obsolete packages path argument is required by NvidiaDetector so I don't think we can yank it without modify ubuntu-drivers-common.

We could stop updating the ubuntu-drivers-obsolete.pkgs in the build of the dist-upgrader tarball though.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Ah, I did make that change to the build process.

ubuntu-release-upgrader (1:17.10.5) artful; urgency=medium

  [ Jeremy Bicha ]
  * Drop obsolete alternate dependencies:
    - gir1.2-vte-2.90
    - gir1.2-webkit-3.0
  * Drop obsolete XS-Testsuite field

  [ Brian Murray ]
  * do-release-upgrade: Clarify that the "-d" switch is only for upgrading
    from the latest supported release to the development release, not any
    release. Additionally, provide a specific error message if run with -d and
    not running the latest supported release. (LP: #1700829)
  * build-tarball.sh: Stop updating ubuntu-drivers-obsolete.pkgs since it
    isn't needed any more see Launchpad bug 1682291 for details.

 -- Brian Murray <email address hidden> Wed, 12 Jul 2017 14:00:20 -0700

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

I wrote an explanation of the current state of this in LP: #1808874