Installing hardware specific packages during installation

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

Would it be nice if the debian-installer automatically installed
mpt-status when it found a machine with a RAID controller supported by
the mptscsih kernel module?  Or if it would install the thinkpad
related packages when installing Debian on a thinkpad laptop?  This
has been impossible to do in d-i, until now.

I've just modified discover-data (v2) to include mapping from PCI id
to debian package, and uploaded a new version with this information
available.  To extract this information, something like this can be
executed using the discover (v2) package:

  /sbin/discover --data-path=package/debian/name all

If any debian package name is reqistered for the detected hardware, it
will be printed to stdout.  From this, it is easy to make a d-i module
to do the installation:

  apt-install `/sbin/discover --data-path=package/debian/name all`

But to make this useful, we need to update the list of packages to be
installed when a given PCI id or USB id is detected.  At the moment,
only this entry is registered in pci-device-deb.xml:

  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
  <device_list bus='pci'>
    <device model='0030' vendor='1000' model_name='53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI'>
      <data class='package'>
        <data class='debian'>
          <data class='name'>mpt-utils</data>
        </data>
        <data class='last-updated'>2006-08-11</data>
        <data class='last-updated-by'>pere@hungry.com</data>
      </data>
    </device>
  </device_list>

If you know of some packages which should be automatically installed
when some hardware is detected, please submit a BTS report against the
discover-data package with the information needed.  I need

 - PCI vendor
 - PCI id
 - debian package name

I'm only interested in packages in the debian archive, and packages in
debian/main have priority over debian/contrib and debian/non-free.

To test your entry, try to insert it into
/lib/discover/pci-dvice-deb.xml after upgrading to discover-data
v2.2006.08.11-1 or newer, and run the command given above.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen