[Pkg-dkms-maint] Bug#554843: bullding pure binary deb kernel module packages with the help of, dkms

[Anthony L. Awtrey]

Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but shouldn't this instead be a bug
> against drivers in Debian that use dkms instead of requiring a new
> package be created in the archive for each relevant kernel release.
> ...
> I guess non-free drivers need more support since some in Security said
> they don't support non-free, but that could be a wont-fix for those
> drivers if the maintainers decide they need dkms in order to support
> updates.

I believe you *are* misunderstanding the issue. Opening dozens of bug
reports for individual drivers is not an answer for anything. If you see
the list of drivers currently in Module Assistant, there are plenty of
Open Source source drivers represented there.

In many cases it is necessary to run newer alsa, kqemu, wifi, scsi or
filesystem drivers than those that ship with otherwise stable kernels.
And since I've got 30 production boxes, the idea of installing all the
dependent packages and then building the same fscking source code 30
times on my production boxes fills me with rage.

Debian's key strength is software packaging and distribution! dkms
should at least provide the option to create stand-alone binary module
packages for distribution of compiled modules to other computers.

Christopher Huhn wrote:
> In this use case it would be very desirable that step 1 is run on only
> one server, creates an aacraid-module-<kernel version>.deb containing
> the binary module and a postinst executing step 2) that can be
> deployed to the other (> 99) servers without the need for dkms and its
> dependencies on all servers.

Exactly! Whoever designed dkms as a replacement for m-a did not talk to
anyone with dozens or hundreds of systems to maintain. It is totally
asinine.

Tony