Re: Automatically installing hardware specific packages
Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> writes:
> [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
And subdevice ids and class ids and more buses and ...
> 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.
Why not reuse the module alias syntax for the hardware application
database as well? It allows for a number of different bus
configurations, not only pci and usb, with class matches where
appropriate. And it is a well known syntax. And it buys you easy
direct matching against /sys/devices/.../modalias
Bjørn
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