Comment 9 for bug 251107

Steve: all the nvidia packages provide an ABI which is not hardcoded. For example (currently) nvidia-glx-177 provides xserver-xorg-video-4 while -96 and -71 provide xserver-xorg-video-2.9. All it would take to make, say, -71, provide the current Xorg ABI it to rebuild it (which is what we will do when the new NVIDIA drivers are ready).

As regards dist-upgrades, I have worked with Michael Vogt so as to make sure that systems which require the -96 and -71 drivers will be migrated to the open source driver ("nv"). A package named nvidia-common does hardware detection so that Update Manager knows which driver should be installed while X-Kit (my xorg.conf parser/validator), which Michael has included in Update Manager, will set the driver to "nv" in the xorg.conf and remove the unsupported "RGBPath" option from the Files section (otherwise Xorg will crash, see #274866) when available.

Driver 173 and 177 don't support all the cards that -71 and -96 do, therefore the only fallback we have is the "nv" driver.