Are packages w/o necessary kernel modules allowed?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 08:09:19 +0300,
  Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:25:00PM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 18:31:03 +0200,
> > > Why should we make peoples' lives harder getting the tools they
> > > need? Example: Somebody without the DAHDI Kernel Modules would
> > > probably not try to use the DAHDI Tools since he probably won't even
> > > know what it's good for. However It makes things easier for the
> > > people who do know what DAHDI is to have tools to use their DAHDI
> > > hardware (they compiled/got the Kernel modules for) just a yum
> > > install away.
> > 
> > Not likely. dahdi-linux support is pretty spotty. atrpms can go a long time
> > without having a version for a specific version Fedora. For example there
> > is no rawhide version now and there was a long period without one for
> > F11.
> 
> Rawhide support has quite low demand and the kernel changes daily or
> more frequently in early rawhide, so any kernel bound support is
> outdated before it is released. We usually fire up the rawhide support

Yes, but usually just rebuilding from the source rpm would work if
I had an environment where I could do that. I am doing that now with
the version based on a spec file from messinet.com.

> about a month or so before the targeted release date (which means
> about now). I don't think that F11 was w/o dahdi-linux kmdls for any
> long period.

Possibly it was during the F11 rawhide period that I looked and I didn't
check back for a while after the release.

Unfortunately my tdm card is in my only machine at home that has 3d graphics at
all working using the drivers in Fedora. And I needed to go to rawhide to
get that working more than I needed to having tdm card working (though in
the end I got both).

> > There are issues trying to rebuild atrpms src rpms on fedora. Just
> > grabbing atrms-rpm-config doesn't help with recursion issues that Alex
> > doesn't see because of his custom environment.
> 
> Who's Alex, and why doesn't atrms-rpm-config work? You may see

Sorry about misspelling your name.

> `recursion' warnings due to rpm's limitation of macros depth (which
> has nothing to do with recursion), which is at 16, but in reality
> means about 3-4 nested macros.

Yes. But I didn't see any clear instructions for how to work around it.
It seems that for some people using --define can work around the problem
if you know what to define. There was also a comment that you don't see
the problem because of something in your environment but I didn't see
any directions on how to set up a similar environment.

> > What I had to do for F12 is grab a spec file (that get's updates at
> > the source) that was proposed for rpmfusion (but never got adopted
> > by them) and then use an svn version of dahdi that has a fix for a
> > change in the way the kernel is being built (some compatibility
> > feature that got dropped in 2.6.32).  That box has been extra
> > unstable lately, though I don't know if that is do to 3D graphics or
> > dahdi-linux.
> 
> Have you tried the common src.rpm at ATrpms? Maybe you should check
> out ATrpms in a couple of days and see whether there is dahdi support
> for F12 there.

I tried using the dahdi-linux src rpm while having atrpms-rpm-config
installed, but hit the recursion problem and got stuck there. I would
still have had the problem with the last released dahdi not working
with 2.6.31 kernels. But fixing that would have taken the same route
as with the path I ended up taking.