[Lunar-commits] r23621 - moonbase/trunk/x11/NVIDIA

[Zbigniew Luszpinski]

Tuesday 13 of March 2007 09:44:59 Samuel Verstraete wrote:
> What did i miss???
> pkg1 is officially on the webiste of nvidia so i'm totally clueless why
> you would prefer the other one...

The pkg1 is big because contains binary blobs with most popular distro 
kernels' modules. Most newbies coming from windows world to linux has 
hardcoded in minds that every driver they have to download and install from 
manufacturer site instead of using package manager. They do not know that 
Linux is different. This is serious problem if you read nvnews.net forum (or 
just forum faq).

pkg0 is designed for non user people: distro builders/maintaners, testers, QA, 
sysadmins. pkg0 is not advertised on www because of reason mentioned before - 
to not raise question: which pkg I should use? That is fine because all 
people who need to know about pkg0 existence know where to look, the rest of 
users are safe by not having to choose.

Both pkg are official but pkg0 does not need to be advertised.

> why would 9755-pkg0 be better than 9755-pkg1 ?

Only size matters :-)
What is better:
* less disk space wasted (7.7MiB vs 14.5MiB),
* shorter download time,
* seldom accesed file on Nvidia server
* shorter depacking time
* and other advatanges of smaller file.

By using -x you can unpack both archives and check them for yourself (or just 
read pkg-history.txt from pkg1.
What's more in pkg1:
* pkg1 has 'precompiled' directory full of binary nvidia modules (16 MiB of 
unpacked stuff)

have a nice day,
Zbigniew 'zbiggy' Luszpinski