5/16/2007 Broken upgrade paths in F7

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 17.05.2007 17:14, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> On 17/05/07, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday 17 May 2007 07:55:18 Josh Boyer wrote:
>>> Ah. I'll try and bug DaveJ about it as we get closer and send (or have
>>> him send) something out once it's know.
>> This is yet another reason why external kmods are such crap piles.  Often
>> times the kernel is the very last package to build, and when we "know" that
>> it is good, is when we actually do the spins.  We don't always have time to
>> wait for N kernel mods to rebuild against it and get tagged.  When the kmods
>> were in a separate repo this was less of an issue, but now that everything is
>> in the same repo it is far far more important of an issue and one that will
>> hound us quite often, like with every kernel update.
> /me resists the urge to ask why Fedora doesn't move to using dkms for
> kernel modules. Yes, I know, Fedora is primarily a binary
> distribution. The packaging of kernel modules that Mathias has been
> doing for freshrpms with dkms is living testament to the ease of that
> approach though. Oh dear, I didn't resist the urge.

In addition to what spot said: On the last FUDCon we discussed kernel
module packaging with some people. The outcome roughly was to work on a
new kernel module packaging standard solves both problems: create
pre-compiled kernel-module packages that can be put in a repo for users
to install; in addition create a dkms/dkms-like solution as rpm in the
repo that users *can* install that will to get their modules rebuild for
the current kernel (on boot?) *if* it's not available .

I hope to find time after F7 is out to work on this.

Ohh, further: there is certain resistance from some important folks to
include kernel module packages in Fedora. Those people have some points,
especially now that Core and Extras are merged. Thus I think we should
create a separate repo in the scop of the Fedora projects to include
kmods. Even more work (but I wrote something up already for that) :-/

CU
thl