On Sep 7, 2006, at 3:05 PM, Joey Hess wrote:
This won't be practical. They are just udebs, but they have complex interdependencies and we can't expect users to pick the right set ofudebs to put on a driver floppy that both supports all the hardware theyneed to support and fit in its limited space. For example, the i386 cd-drivers floppy contained 19 udebs.The situation may be much simpler in some cases if the particular driver media only needs to include one or two udebs containing kernel firmware,but that's no reason to break the current driver floppies.
Is there some fundamental reason why there must be only one (or two? {network and CD}) drivers floppy that contains everything? Is it possible to publish instructions for creating a "supplemental drivers" floppy that has the (one or a few) extra udebs needed for your particular hardware in addition to the standard one (or two) that everybody uses? Certainly the stuff on the current driver floppies needs complex interdependencies, but I don't understand why that extends to the contents of a supplemental drivers floppy. You're going to install everything and only those things on that floppy. End of story. No complex dependencies needed. Or am I missing something?
Rick