[Fedora-packaging] Kernel Module Packages

[Jack Neely]

> I'm just trying to get this conversation moving forward again by
> making sure everyone is aware of where the current implementation
> stands.  This particular issue  seems to be forever stalled in a
> debate over where to start.. policy or tools.  I'd hate to see this

Well, we've got a small bit of the functionality in Yum working...if
oddly.  I don't mind doing that work but we need some idea of policy
that I can code to.  :-)  

> conversation frustrated further by an inaccurate accessment of current
> reality.  If packagers provided "kernel-modules" the current magic in
> yum would work pretty well for most of the situations an end-user
> would care about.  What are the real hold ups here... why isn't it
> good enough to make a policy decision that all Core and Extras module
> packages provide "kernel-modules" and be named
> "kernel-module-whatever" as a starting point to get some packages out?
> 

How I would like things to be:

Kernel module packages MUST provide "kernel-modules".  Not
"kernel-module".  This keeps in line with previous work and already
existing code.  This provides will identify to Yum/Plague/Whatever that
this package is a kernel module and needs special treatment.

Kernel module packages MUST require kernel-%{_targetcpu} = ${kver}.
This identifies to Yum what kernel this module works with and will
identify other kernel module packages that need to be removed.

The release tag will be <RELEASE>.%{?kver:.%(echo %{kver} | tr - _)} or
something along those lines.  This provides no information to Yum/Plague
but gives the package a unique EVR.  Its really hard to correctly parse
information like a kernel version out of the release tag.

I really don't like the kernel-module-foo-source base package that
produces a subpackage of kernel-module-foo.  This adds way to much
complexity.  The goal here, IIRC, is to be able to have one src.rpm for
all the times that the kernel-module-foo has been rebuilt for each
kernel version/flavor.  Being that the release tag already contains a
lot of our magic I suggest we make the release tag be the following.  

   Release: [release]%{!?sourcepackage:%(echo .%{kver} | tr - _)}

where [release] is the packager's release number of the package.

With this idea we ignore/delete all srpms that are created with rebuilds
of the kerenl-module-foo package.  To generate the official srpm the
build system does:

   rpmbuild -bs kernel-module-foo.spec [defines] \
   --define "sourcepackage  1" [targets]

If this srpm already exists in the repository then ignore it.
Otherwise, you have a new version of the kernel module itself rather
than just 15 hundred rebuilds of it.

Jack

> -jef
> 
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-- 
Jack Neely <jjneely at ncsu.edu>
Realm Linux Administration and Development
PAMS Computer Operations at NC State University
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