thoughts on modules-extra subpackage...

I'm sorry I missed the original discussion thread. I was blinded by my birthday and the Thanksgiving holiday. :-) That, and I've been chipping away to get the compat-wireless bits shaped-up for proper Fedora integration... Actually, the latter is what brought modules-extra to my attention. My changes cause ssb to not be built in the main kernel tree. For some reason, ssb got added to mod-extra.list. So, the combination of modules-extra and my changes resulted in a broken build. FWIW, I think that fix is simple -- I don't think ssb should have been in that list in the first place. So that brings me to the first big concern... Should we have _any_ hardware enablement included in the modules-extra package? If so, what is the cut-off? Do we really want to diminish our out-of-the-box hardware support for whatever benefit modules-extra provides? Is there SMOLT data or something similar to justify the list of modules being moved? Two other big chunks of the module-extras package are TCP congestion control algorithms and network queueing disciplines. These two types of modules come immediately into play when someone is trying to tune the performance of their networks. If anything, we should be encouraging their use, not making them more invisible. So, I'm wondering why these got put into the mod-extra.list file? As for the stated benefits... I'm skeptical of the security argument. I mean, I can believe that a module could get accidentally or inadvertantly loaded and then exploited. I just think that closing those holes is a better plan. Also, I find the size argument unconvincing as well. I just don't think a couple of megs of storage savings amounts to much these days, especially if you create confusion or remove functionality in the process. The cruft argument is the most reasonable for at least some of the modules in the list, but I'm not sure it is sufficient to justify the confusion and churn. So anyway, just in case you were wondering about my opinion... :-) John -- John W. Linville The water won't run clean until you get linville(a)redhat.com the pigs out of the creek.