The PCMCIA and kernel packages

[Brian Mays <bem5r@neutron.mane.virginia.edu>]

At Oliver Oberdorf's request, I have assumed the responsibility for
maintaining the pcmcia-cs package.  Since this package contains kernel
modules, it must be coordinated with the kernel package.  From what
the package creator, Oliver Oberdorf, has told me, I believe that
three proposals have been advanced to handle the kernel-PCMCIA
compatibility problem.  Please inform me if this is incorrect.

Option 1: The pcmcia-cs package remains complete as it now exists.  It
would be my responsibility to ensure that the binary package is
compiled for the latest kernel.  This is the current state of the
package.

Option 2: The modules are removed from the pcmcia-cs package and
placed in Simon Shapiro's kernel-image package.  The remaining binary
tools and config files remain in the pcmcia-cs package.

Option 3: The pcmcia-cs package is given to Manoj Srivastava to be
incorporated into his "kernel debianizer" package.

There are problems with incorporating PCMCIA into the kernel package,
the most important of which is size.  Adding the entire pcmcia package
to the kernel package will increase the size of the kernel-source deb
file by 576k or 10%.  The size of the kernel-image deb file will
increase by 283k or 33%.  Even if the binary tools and config files
are omitted, the PCMCIA modules alone will increase the size of the
kernel-image deb file by 113k or 13%.  Since the number of users with
PCMCIA hardware is small, do we really need to add the extra modules
to the kernel package?

--
Brian Mays <brian@debian.org>