add a special Provides: to all login manager packages

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 08:28 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 17:08 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > But we didn't ban non-upstream modules.  Instead we made the kernel team
> > > the gateway.  If the module is good enough to provide to Fedora users,
> > > it's good enough to be in the kernel package proper.  This gets around
> > > the build timing / ordering issue, it prevents newer kernels from
> > > causing the module to stop building, it removes the need for gross
> > > yum/rpm hacks to handle the packages properly, it removes the need to
> > > re-create the initrd after a module update, so on and so forth.
> > 
> > But the kernel maintainers are extremely selective in what they want to
> > build as part of the kernel package, and I don't really blame them.
> > Allowing other maintainers to maintain their modules separately means they
> > keep most of the burden of keeping them up to date, and they can even be
> > temporarily unbuildable in Rawhide without breaking the kernel, we only
> > need them working when a release or a kernel update to a release is made.
> 
> Wrong, by having them unworking you're preventing that class of users
> from testing rawhide.  Bad form.  Rawhide is not a dumping ground to
> only be worried about at release time.

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.

Looked at logically, though, it doesn't make much sense. A few modules
are external. Most are inside the kernel package. There isn't really any
particular reasoning (let alone a policy) as to what goes where, except
that non-free modules are obviously done externally.

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.

MDV mostly keeps the system around, I think, for the case of non-free
modules, which of course does not apply to Fedora.

MHO, anyway.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net