[Pkg-dkms-maint] Bug#741399: dkms: consider avoiding unnecessary rpm commands

[Mike Miller]

Package: dkms
Version: 2.2.0.3-1.2
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Dear Maintainer,

Please consider patching dkms when built for Debian to avoid unnecessary rpm
commands. We know that Debian systems do not use the rpm database so there is
no need to query it. The lsb-core package pulls in rpm.

The primary reason to patch these commands out is because when rpm is
installed, an rpm database query will be run unavoidably. With the default
configuration of the rpm package for Debian, this will create an empty rpm
database in either /root/.rpmdb (if HOME=/root) or in the system root directory
/.rpmdb (if HOME is not set, e.g. running under PackageKit).

Avoiding rpmdb queries in dkms will avoid inadvertent creation of these stray
directories.

A patch to dkms [1] was posted to Ubuntu bug #1069350 [2] that is reported
there to fix this behavior.

[1] https://launchpadlibrarian.net/167218071/disable-rpm.patch
[2] https://launchpad.net/bugs/1069350



-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental'), (1, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.12-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages dkms depends on:
ii  build-essential    11.6
ii  coreutils          8.21-1
ii  dpkg-dev           1.17.6
ii  gcc                4:4.8.2-2
ii  make               3.81-8.3
ii  module-init-tools  16-2
ii  patch              2.7.1-4

Versions of packages dkms recommends:
ii  fakeroot             1.18.4-2
ii  linux-headers-amd64  3.12+55
pn  linux-image          <none>
ii  menu                 2.1.46
ii  sudo                 1.8.9p5-1

dkms suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information