Re: Automatically installing hardware specific packages
[Petter Reinholdtsen]
> Are there better ways to do this? Anyone willing to work on it?
One alternative would be to move the information out of the
discover-data package, and into the Packages file instead, similar to
how Iceweasel[1] and Moonlight[2] might find their plugins and codec
packages, and store USB and PCI ids there.
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FlashExperienceIntrepid
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianMonoGroup/Moonlight
The idea I got was to add headers like this to the package supporting
specific hardware, and use this information to look up the USB and PCI
ids present in the machine:
Xb-Hardware-Bus-PCI: 1af4:1002
Xb-Hardware-Bus-USB: 1d6b:0001
This way the build system for the X video card packages could extract
the list of PCI devices supported by the driver and include it in the
control file of the package, and the RAID controller packages could
list the supported hardware ids too. It would get rid of the central
hardware->package directory, and probably scale better than the
discover-pkginstall approach.
A problem with this approach is that some packages support a lot of
PCI ids, and another is that some packages support ranges of ids or
classes of devices. Not sure how that is best represented in a
Packages file.
> Fedora 13 provides PackageKit to install hardware specific packages
> after installation. Perhaps we should extend the discover system to
> listen to DBus events and install hardware packages also after
> installation? Or port PackageKit to Debian and use it instead?
Anyone know how this work?
> Anyway, a draft system is in d-i at the moment, and I welcome help
> with updating the hardware mappings to get more packages installed
> automatically by d-i. :)
I got a bunch of updates, and these are now in the discover-data
package in unstable and testing, but I am sure there are more hardware
specific packages out there, and very much welcome more mappings.:)
Happy hacking,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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