Hacking modversions

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Wed Mar 2 00:18:30 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Fernando Herrera wrote:

> El mar, 01-03-2005 a las 18:10 -0500, David Zeuthen escribió:
> > On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 23:56 +0100, Fernando Herrera wrote:
> 
> > >But if Sally bought a webcam
> > >that is not supported by the standard kernel, should we say to her
> > >"Don't use linux, use Windows"?
> > >
> > 
> > Can someone explain to me why this is not a package management problem?
> 
> a) 3rd party Open Source kernel module maintainers cannot manage so many
> packages for so many distributions.

Actually, that is not so big a problem, building kernel modules is not a 
CPU intensive task. The biggest problem is that building kernel modules 
for 2.6 actually become harder (because of internal changes), instead of 
easier since 2.4.

That's why I postponed all kernel-module development for now.


> b) That woudn't be inmediate. If Sally up2date magics update her kernel
> and she has to wait 4 days to get his webcam back working is a bad user
> experience.

4 days would certainly be a bit exagerated and frankly, I don't think 
Sally would mind if the kernel was held back until the camera module 
becomes available.

It would be nice though if the package manager could indicate how long a 
certain update has been held back, so a user could make an opiniated 
decision to stay with the current kernel, or go without webcam driver.

What's the alternative anyway if you're stuck with unusual hardware that 
do have external drivers ?

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]


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