On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Joey Hess wrote:
Jurij Smakov wrote:* Automatic rebuilds (configurable) on kernel updates. Nothing fancy, just a transparent way to figure out whether the currently installed kernel module source is compatible with the new kernel, and attempt rebuild and installation, if neccessary.The thing I really want to see is a way to guarantee that a binary module package will get updated in the debian archive when the kernel is changed. Until we have this guarantee, there's really no way the installer can reliably depend on out of tree modules that need to be used for anything during installation, and there's no way the installer can reliably cause these module packages to be installed on the target system. I collolary of that last is that there also needs to be a way to ensure that module packages are always upgraded when the kernel is, which probably would mean doing something tricky with module package names and dependencies.
Ok, here is the idea: say we make a policy for each module-source package, so that we have a common interface and can automatically rebuild it. Then we make a package, build-depending on *all* the module-source packages out there, which are currently known to be policy compliant. This package will generate a set of binary packages (one per flavour), each of them will contain *all* the binary out-of-tree modules for that flavour, produced during build from the module-source packages. When new kernel is released, we test-build this package against the new kernel headers, and upload it, it is built on autobuilders, and produces binary packages. Installing linux-image-2.x.y-a-flavour and out-of-tree-modules-2.x.y-a-flavour (and, optionally, out-of-tree-non-free) puts the whole shebang in /lib/modules/version, and you can use the current mechanism of kernel-wedge and linux-kernel-di packages to split them into udebs.
I don't think that the idea of automatic rebuilding of module-source packages in the archive (via binNMU or otherwise) is acceptable. I think it should be done by hand, so that there is at least some QA here. If the module-source package fails to build, it can always be temporarily removed from the out-of-tree-modules source package. That will also motivate people to update the module-source to the new kernel quicker :-).
What do you think? Best regards, Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC