Building kmod packages w. fedora-kmodhelper

[Ville Skyttä]

On Fri, 2006-03-10 at 11:23 -0500, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:

> 	Requires:         ${kmod_name}-kmod-common = %{version}
> ...
> 
> Is there (or, if not, should there be) a way to make this optional, so
> it can be turned off by the packager (for those times where a
> kmod-common package would end up empty anyway) ?

That's right, it cannot be turned off, and that's intentional because
there's no way to add anything but the actual modules and the standard
"built-in" Provides and Requires in the kmod-* packages.  While it would
be theoretically possible to implement the latter, I think the current
approach is better.

In most cases, there are things like udev configuration, dependencies on
some userspace packages and whatnot that are required for the modules to
be useful, and it's better to split them away from the module packages
for example to avoid conflicts and/or duplication.  If nothing else, at
least there's documentation and license texts for the modules that
should be in the -common package.  Other packages depending on the
particular modules should also use the -common package as the dependency
that pulls them in, instead of having a direct dependency on the kmod-*
packages.

Note that you can have Provides: foo-kmod-common in whatever package you
like, it doesn't have to be named foo-kmod-common.