On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 08:28 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote: > On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 17:08 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote: > > Jesse Keating wrote: > > > But we didn't ban non-upstream modules. Instead we made the kernel team > > > the gateway. If the module is good enough to provide to Fedora users, > > > it's good enough to be in the kernel package proper. This gets around > > > the build timing / ordering issue, it prevents newer kernels from > > > causing the module to stop building, it removes the need for gross > > > yum/rpm hacks to handle the packages properly, it removes the need to > > > re-create the initrd after a module update, so on and so forth. > > > > But the kernel maintainers are extremely selective in what they want to > > build as part of the kernel package, and I don't really blame them. > > Allowing other maintainers to maintain their modules separately means they > > keep most of the burden of keeping them up to date, and they can even be > > temporarily unbuildable in Rawhide without breaking the kernel, we only > > need them working when a release or a kernel update to a release is made. > > Wrong, by having them unworking you're preventing that class of users > from testing rawhide. Bad form. Rawhide is not a dumping ground to > only be worried about at release time. Just to provide some input to this debate - Mandriva allows external modules in the official repositories. DKMS is used to address the problems Jesse raised. This works pretty well, although only after quite a lot of experience and tweaking of the system - there were problems associated with it in the past. Looked at logically, though, it doesn't make much sense. A few modules are external. Most are inside the kernel package. There isn't really any particular reasoning (let alone a policy) as to what goes where, except that non-free modules are obviously done externally. I can see Kevin's argument, and I don't think Jesse's objections quite hold water, because you're missing the class of not-vital-but-nice-to-have modules - like, say, a webcam driver. But overall, I'm not convinced that it's worth the extra effort of maintaining a system (like akmods or dkms) for handling external kernel modules. The benefits of allowing non-critical modules not to be the kernel team's problem and not to be a roadblock to the kernel itself working are real, but probably aren't big enough for the extra work to be worth it. MDV mostly keeps the system around, I think, for the case of non-free modules, which of course does not apply to Fedora. MHO, anyway. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
