RFC: kernel-modules in Fedora Extras

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 23:48 +0200, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 15:13 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > Am Samstag, den 07.01.2006, 14:49 +0100 schrieb Ralf Corsepius:
> 
> > > Then building for all those in updates + core would be a reasonable
> > > compromise.
> > 
> > What do others think about this compromise?
> 
> Mixed feelings.
You have no choice.

The current behavior renders "yum update" unusable for *all end users*
using kernel-modules, and forces *all* those *end users* to rebuild the
kernel-modules.

This is not a problem for me, but this can not be acceptable for
"ordinary end users".

>   On the other hand it's ok, but on the other:
> Let's say FC5 is released, and I have a foo module package in Extras.
> Time passes, FC5 kernel updates are rolled out, and foo has a new
> upstream version to which I need to upgrade so that it'll work with the
> latest FC5 updates.  But it breaks with the original FC5 baseline
> kernel.  I can easily find more productive use for my time than to try
> to hack the new package to work with the old kernel (which nobody should
> really be using anymore anyway) within one distro branch.
> 
> Also, I think the binaries built for the old baseline kernel would
> receive _very_ little if any testing by anyone, and I thoroughly dislike
> the "if it builds, it should work, right?" way when talking about
> shipping packages to a "production" repository.
Agreed, but ... end user must be provided with a kernel-module matching
their currently running kernel, otherwise "yum update" will always fail.

This will cause these end users to look out for alternatives
(proprietary installers, other 3rd parties etc.) and in the end probably
could cause them to switch away from Fedora.

Ralf