forked kernel module
I have an at1700 card that only works with a driver that is
not in the standard kernel tree; personally I think the
driver in the standard kernel is broken, and should be replaced
by the one I use, and have made comments to such an extent,
but it seems that Donald (though it in no way diminishes his
contribution) has this "infallability" reputation going on. He's
spruced up the "official" driver from time to time (added
MCA bus support). So the end result is the two modules
(which were based off different card drivers to begin with)
are hopelessly forked.
Anyway I reinstalled a new kernel the other day and decided
that I was sick of pasting the alternate driver in, so it
might be nice to package it somehow. Unfortunately these cards
do not detect very well when loaded from a module, so
it needs to be compiled into the kernel. A whole kernel
package for this seems excessive though. What would
be the best way to distribute it? Should Debian have a
few "grab bag" precompiled kernel packages with various
nonstandard features, or should there be a "source patch"
package that can be installed along with kernel-source
for this purpose? What's the right balance of "distro bloat"
to user convenience? Anyone here dealt with a similar
issue?
--
Brian S. Julin
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