On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 14:37 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
Just to provide some input to this debate -
Mandriva allows external modules in the official repositories. DKMS is used to address the problems Jesse raised. This works pretty well, although only after quite a lot of experience and tweaking of the system
- there were problems associated with it in the past.
DKMS requires you have all the devel tools installed to get the kernel modules built. This was discarded as an option for fedora for that reason.
I can see Kevin's argument, and I don't think Jesse's objections quite hold water, because you're missing the class of not-vital-but-nice-to-have modules - like, say, a webcam driver. But overall, I'm not convinced that it's worth the extra effort of maintaining a system (like akmods or dkms) for handling external kernel modules. The benefits of allowing non-critical modules not to be the kernel team's problem and not to be a roadblock to the kernel itself working are real, but probably aren't big enough for the extra work to be worth it.
The weirdnesses with handling kernel module updates when you're not updating the kernel (and/or both) is excruciating. If you want to do some painful reading look back at the kmod/akmod/kernmod discussion from a few years ago.
-sv