[Fedora-packaging] Re: fedorakmod.py unfixable

[Jon Masters]

On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 14:52 -0400, Jack Neely wrote:

> I'm starting to think that Jesse is right.  Kernel modules don't belong
> here.  We have a couple good suggestions and sem-workable code for them.
> Hopefully they will be supplanted by the kabi stuff in the near future as
> I think that shows a lot of promise.

Ok. A few comments here. I'm sorry I've not shouted too much before but
I'm trying to listen rather than come into this group with too strong an
opinion. I am very interested in discussing what we can do in the longer
term about module packaging via IRC/whatever if it's useful toward
reaching consensus, but I'm the new guy here so you tell me! :-)

At the moment, the kABI stuff is a small addition to kmods. I changed
the kmodtool slightly (couple of lines of patch, attached a version) so
that we depend upon kABI and remove the dependency on a particular
kernel package version. All of that is in rawhide right now and has
actually been for a while - but not so useful with no "stable" kABI.

I modified the kernel package build so that a new tool, kabitool,
determines the groupings of ABI dependencies that are generated (it's
all to work around limitations in RPM for the moment) and can take a
config file that specifies these groupings too - so in the future, we
could group things like the module struct, printk and other stuff that
changes little but is a common dep. into its own dep. grouping. That
would help when not having a stable kABI, but only a little.

Still, we don't have a stable kABI in Fedora (and that includes locking
hierarchies that aren't automatically checked at the moment) so I am
keen to avoid overselling ABI matching to the Fedora user base. I am,
however working on some patches (as upstream maintainer of m-i-t) to
allow depmod to be given explicit module priorities for multiple
matching names under /lib/modules. This will allow us to override which
modules will be selected by insmod/modprobe through a simple conf.d. I
am hoping to get that stuff out into rawhide this week and available.

Jon.

-- 
Jon Masters                  Phone: +44 7776 131337
Red Hat UK, Ltd.             Email: jcm at redhat.com
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