Re: add a special Provides: to all login manager packages
On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 19:02 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
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.
Yeah. I don't want to get too far into an issue I'm not advocating for
in the first place, but, briefly: MDV builds DKMS 'binary' packages -
packages with pre-built modules, in a layout that DKMS understands -
(it's done semi-automatically from the DKMS 'source' packages) for the
most important modules (like NVIDIA and ATI) for the initial release
kernel and all official update kernels, for stable releases. These get
sent out at the same time as the official updates. So you can run the
most common external modules on an official release without DKMS ever
actually having to build the module.
(This is where a lot of the problems I alluded to came from. It took a
few years of experience to get this whole system to the point where it
actually *works* smoothly).
This isn't done for more obscure DKMS-handled modules, for backport and
third-party kernels, or for Cooker (Rawhide equivalent). If you use any
of those, you have to have the DKMS 'source' package installed, which
brings in the basic compilation toolchain and the appropriate kernel
headers via dependencies.
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.
I've probably read several alternative incarnations of much the same
discussion. =) It is somewhat inherently a painful area, and MDV
certainly has quite a lot of tweaking to DKMS and some significant
internal architecture to make it all work more or less smoothly. Which
is why I said it's probably not worth the effort.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net