[Fedora-packaging] Kernel Module Packages

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Thursday 18 August 2005 21:27, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 19:56 +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> > 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.

My example was not perfectly well chosen. The idea was to have provider 
prefixes like adaptec, nvidia, ati and similar, so an example out-of-line 
aic7xxx upgrade would be adaptec-aic7xxx-8.9.10-2.6.13_99_smp-3, etc.

> > 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 makes %version or %release more appropriate for overloading? With the 
driver version as part of %version or %release, you can't easily offer 
packages for more than one version of a driver for the same kernel, and yet 
have working updates. I would be surprised if you didn't ever have this 
situation with RHEL.

-- Andreas.