Re: Some ideas regarding hardware detection and the installation system

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Otavio Salvador]
> I think it can be improved. Let me explain my idea:
>
> If we build the module that we want to add on the database and write a
> small script that uses modules.alias file updated with it we can write
> the database will full module knownledge available. This would all
> make possible to write a small script that does make this
> automatically.
>
> grep ata_piix /lib/modules/2.6.22-1-686/modules.alias \
>    | sed 's,pci:v0000\(.*\)d0000\(.*\)sv.*,\1:\2,g' \
>    | sort -u

I am unable to understand the idea.  It might be because I do not know
the use of the modules.alias file.

> Can you please elaborate a little more how do you intend to do that?
> I personally wouldn't like to have my system with gcc and like,
> needed to build the module, so would be nice if we might purge those
> packages after building it. I also don't know where do you think it
> might fit better?

Well, my idea is to just install everything needed to build the kernel
module if the hardware need such kernel module and then build and
install it.  After all, the kernel module need to be built again when
the kernel is upgraded, and thus the compiler need to be present then.

And I am not quite sure where in d-i it fits, but suspect some time
after tasksel is done as a script included in the hw-detect udeb .

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen