[Fedora-packaging] Re: atrpms kernel modules

[Axel Thimm]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 10:19:19AM -0500, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 16:54 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> 
> > There is the kmdl proposal which doesn't even need any special plugins
> > to remain rpm-compliant for both rpm and all depsolvers and while
> > support for coinstalls for new kernels is missing in all depsolvers it
> > proved to be trivial to add a < 100 lines easy to maintain plugin to
> > accomplish that. So there really is only the I-don't-like-uname-r-
> > in-name issue left ...
> 
> Axel, what are the differences between the "kmdl" proposal and the
> existing Fedora kernel module standard? Can you summarize for me?

The main design differences are

o one src.rpm for both userland and kernel module subpackages.
o full abstraction of names and embedded dependencies supporting among
  others a uname-r-in-name scheme.

The latter means that the kmdl macros used are flexible enough to even
produce the current kernel module scheme. But they can also produce
what is usually known as kmdl packages including the uname-r-in-name
idiom and therefore remaining rpm conformant.

So kmdl is both

o an abstract interface hiding implementation details from the
  specfile
o an explit implemenentation of these macros to fulfill rpm compliant
  versioning of kernel modules

This results in a flexible and powerful kernel module macro language
and very small and maintainable forward-compatible specfiles
(e.g. specfiles survive any furture implementation modification).

For a very small (but also very old) example see

    http://dl.atrpms.net/all/arc4.spec

(This kmdl is used for *swan support on RHEL3 IIRC, e.g. the openswan
kmdl depends on presence of the arc4 cipher. It was the smallest
example I found, it has no userland parts but the placeholders are
still there)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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