FC2 kernel quality

Enrico Scholz enrico.scholz at informatik.tu-chemnitz.de
Thu Sep 30 20:25:13 UTC 2004


fedora at leemhuis.info (Thorsten Leemhuis) writes:

>> > Problem: Users that want to compile kernel modules (Nvidia Drivers...)
>> > need to install the rpm.
>> 
>> I do not see the problem here. Only few software can be built without
>> additional packages (you need at least gcc, make, perhaps m4, bison,
>> ...). 
>
> I see the problem. All those users of the nvidia driver will have
> problems to build the kernel module.

Why? Do you think a user will see the difference between

| $ make
| bash: make: command not found

and a compilation error? It will be task of NVidia to write sufficient
documentation and/or diagnostic. And btw... the nvidia driver are not
supported by FC ;)


> And what will they search for to solve the problem: a kernel-source(code)
> rpm that is will not be part of FC3 (as it seems).

This is caused by missing packing policies. When RH would require things
like

| Provides: %name-devel = %epoch:%version-%release

in packages with header-files but without a separate -devel subpackage,
a future splitting (e.g. because of efficiency reasons or additional
dependencies) would be much less painful. In this case, the
module-packages could buildrequire 'kernel-devel' and would build both
with monolitic and splitted packages.


>> When the case above would be very common, you can make the
>> header-package part of the base-system but without requiring it
>> explicitly. So it can be disabled on minimal installations.
>
> Don't understand this.

Add 'kernel-devel' to the comps.xml file (as 'type="default"'). Custom
kickstart installations could disable it by adding '-kernel-devel' to
the %files list.


> How to solve the problem with updated kernels and the needed headers
> for those?

??? Just add 'kernel-devel' to apt's 'Allow-Duplicated'; yum has
probably something similar. So it won't be a problem to install
multiple 'kernel-devel' packages.




Enrico




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