Comment 5 for bug 32853

> you will notice that their whole driver is distributed as source code

Bloodypriest:

I'm being pedantic but it is a binary package with a bit of glue source to let the kernel try and call various functions in the binary object. If the whole thing is distributed as source, where on earth is the source to nv-kernel.o ? What about the source for the distributed libraries libGL.la libGLcore.so.1.0.* and so forth? What do all the different Xid messages mean? If you don't distribute all the source then you are anything but a source package.

That isn't to say this doesn't allow support for a wider range of kernels than a pure binary distribution - it does. However let's say the upstream kernel changes its support for how supsend to ram works. The only thing you can do now is change the glue source hooks to disable suspend to ram until NVIDIA release a new binary driver with the required support.

Currently, glue kernel source and a binary lump are about the only way to feasibly distribute binary drivers which have to run on more than one distro. This is the minimum that could be done.