[Fedora-packaging] Kernel Module Packages

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 19:56 +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have thought about rpm packages containing kernel modules independently of 
> the threads in this mailing list, which Matt Domsch was friendly enough to 
> pointed me at --- thanks, Matt. Maybe we can share some thoughts, and even 
> move our implementations a little closer together.

Welcome to the unified flame-war... i mean, party. :)

> You seem to also prefix kernel module package names with ``kernel-module-'' to 
> make them easier to identify. Not really necessary I believe, especially 
> since they can as well be listed with --whatrequires.

We're doing this for user sanity as well, and to help differentiate
userspace packages from kernel-module packages. (Yum might be checking
for it as well, but I'm not the expert on that).

> We thought it useful to include a unique provider prefix in the package name 
> though, so that different vendors won't produce name clashes. Our plan was to 
> use the LANANA provider names registry (http://www.lanana.org/) for that.

Ugh. I really don't want to cram everything and the kitchen sink into
the package name. I'd rather see the package check for a
SuSE/Fedora/Whatever only file on the system and use that to determine
if its in the right place or not. We also have dist tags for that
purpose in Fedora Extras.

> The driver name, driver version, and kernel release ($KERNELRELEASE) are also 
> stored differently in rpm tags: our build system likes to be able to freely 
> assign the package release number, so we don't store extra information there. 
> Rather, we put the driver version in the Name, and the kernel release in the 
> Version:

Hmm. Again, I don't want to overload %{name}. That's not what its there
for, imho.

> What I'm also missing in your proposals is mkinitrd calls: When modules that 
> are part of initrds get replaced, you also want to update it the initrds I 
> guess.

That's not too hard, really. We can use the same /sbin/new-kernel-pkg
that the Fedora kernel uses:

/sbin/new-kernel-pkg --mkinitrd --depmod --install %{KVERREL}

~spot
-- 
Tom "spot" Callaway: Red Hat Senior Sales Engineer || GPG ID: 93054260
Fedora Extras Steering Committee Member (RPM Standards and Practices)
Aurora Linux Project Leader: http://auroralinux.org
Lemurs, llamas, and sparcs, oh my!