Kernel modules in Fedora Extras

[Ville Skyttä]

On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 15:11 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 19:45 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > 
> > Ohh, I forgot -- we currently use something like
> > 
> > ExclusiveArch: i586, i686, x86_64, ppc
> > 
> > to specify the target archs to build for. Some people don't like that --
> > it would be good if the buildsys could handle this, too (but of course
> > the buildsys should not try to build for i386 -- that will fail). 
> 
> Out of curiosity, what _do_ they want to do?  Do they just want to put
> nothing in the specfile

Yes, if it is not known that something in the packaged modules
*themselves* prevents them from working or makes them useless on some
architectures (ExcludeArch), or if it is not known that the modules work
or are useful only on a known set of architectures (ExclusiveArch).

Consider someone running a custom kernel built for an architecture that
is not shipped in FE (for example sparc or ia64 or pentium4 or whatever,
these are just examples so ignore specifics and (non-)availability of
the rest of the distro for the moment) and modules which per se are very
much usable on that architecture.  The rebuild of the module packages
will fail because of the pesky hardcoded ExclusiveArch which is not
there because the modules would actually need it nor to describe
constraints of the modules, but because ExclusiveArch is being (ab)used
for something else.

>  and have it work magically?

If the buildsys knows the EVR of the latest kernel that modules should
be built for and its variants, surely it's also capable of knowing what
archs are they available for in FC and knows what archs it can build
stuff for, and can pass the appropriate --target rpmbuild switches to
the build, no?  Why would that be any more magical or cause more
assumptions or be somehow bad when it's (sometime going to be, I gather)
already passing --define 'kversion ...' and --define 'kvariants ...'?

Note: this is not really that big a deal nor would it cause unacceptable
practical problems even for distro rebuilders IMO, it's just me (and
others who dislike ExclusiveArch being used for the purpose of *adding*
non-default archs to build for) being pedantic.