Re: pcmcia-modules in woody
dmaze@debian.org (David Z Maze) asked:
> Does it scale well to having n different external kernel module
> packages, all of which will want binary packages?
It certainly scales better than requiring each of the external kernel
module packages to depend on m (a number larger than m) kernel
source packages. It is much easier to maintain, since each external
module source package (e.g., pcmcia-source) has only one version.
Thus, the source for kernel-image-xxx-yyy need depend on only the
kernel-source-xxx and pcmcia-source binaries (and whatever other source
debs for other external module packages), and these dependencies do
not change for the life of the package. Compare this to requiring the
pcmcia-cs source to depend on all of the kernel-image sources, the list
of which changes constantly as new packages are introduced.
> How do we get modules besides pcmcia built with the kernel?
This is accomplished in the same fashion. All of the external module
packages should support the build interface provided by make-kpkg (in
kernel-package) to simplify the task of building them.
> It also sounds like this will lead to pain for people who want a
> slightly modified version of the stock Debian kernel: downloading
> and installing kernel-source and all of its dependencies takes a lot
> longer with this model, and actually building it gets you lots of
> added kernel module packages that you don't necessarily want.
I think that you are confused here. The kernel-source packages will
not depend on pcmcia-cs. Instead the kernel-image packages will have
a build-time dependency on the appropriate source packages. For
example, the kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs package should have build-time
dependencies on kernel-source-2.2.20, kernel-package, pcmcia-source,
and whatever other external module source packages that the maintainer
decides to support.
Any user can still install kernel-source-2.2.20 to build his own custom
kernel, without needing or using the pcmcia sources.
- Brian
Reply to: