Bug#577451: hw-detect: Should automatically install hardware related packages (RAID tools, printer drivers, fingerprint scanner tools, etc)

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

Package: hw-detect
Version: 1.50
Tags:    patch

For some kind of hardware, it would be very nice if the Debian
installer automatically installed the packages to support the hardware
in question.  An example is the RAID monitoring and administration
tools needed to check and configure a hardware RAID (like cpqarrayd
and mpt-status).  Another is a TV card which might need V4L(2) tools
to configure it.

In Debian, the discover tool is capable of handling this for USB and
PCI devices at the moment.  I've written a wrapper script
discover-pkginstall to provide hw-detect with a simple way to get
these hardware specific packages installed by the installer.  The
feature have been on my todo list for a long time, so I report this
against an old hw-detect version to document this. :)

To make the feature really useful, the database with hardware to
package mappings in discover-data need to be updated to list all the
packages that should be installed when a given PCI or USB device is
discovered.  At the moment there are 34 PCI and 48 USB devices with
package mappings in the database, but I am sure there are more
hardware we should handle out there.

This untested patch relative to the current svn source should
implement this feature:

Index: hw-detect.post-base-installer.d/60install-hwpackages
===================================================================
--- hw-detect.post-base-installer.d/60install-hwpackages        (revision 0)
+++ hw-detect.post-base-installer.d/60install-hwpackages        (revision 0)
@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+#!/bin/sh
+
+set -e
+
+. /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
+
+apt-install discover || true
+if [ -x /target/sbin/discover-pkginstall ] ; then
+   in-target discover-pkginstall
+fi

I suspect it need more work to get the debconf stuff to work properly
from within d-i.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen