[Pkg-lirc-maint] [PATCH 0/8] Send in Ubuntu delta in small mergable snippets

Mario Limonciello superm1 at ubuntu.com
Sun Aug 16 19:57:14 UTC 2009


Hey Stefan:

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 15:12, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann <s.L-H at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi
>
> As it seems this patch does mostly 2 things:
> - nuking debconf for lirc-modules-source
>        this is something I very much agree about
> - switching the module buildsystem to dkms
>        well, dkms has been uploaded to unstable recently and the first
> modules
>        are switching over (drbd8-source and optionally
> openafs-modules-dkms)...
>        So far I haven't seen a canonical recommendation other than
>        module-assistant for packaging kernel modules in Debian and given
> that
>        the intention is to add lirc-modules-source to
> linux-modules-extra-2.6,
>        this switch would be detrimental to that goal (which also requires
> to
>        rename lirc-module-source to lirc-source for technical reasons).
>        This needs further discussion with the other pkg-lirc team members,
> but
>        the most I might see here, would be an option like
> openafs-modules-dkms,
>        which offers both ways in separate binary source packages.

What some packages have been doing is doing a DKMS option or the
pre-included modules side by side.  I think this is a good compromise.  In
Ubuntu we only use the DKMS solution if the user is running their own custom
kernel or needs to patch the modules themselves and needs a good means to do
so.

>
>
> (on a very personal side note, I do not consider dkms a viable method to
>  ship kernel modules in Debian, as dpkg knows nothing about it, the
>  actually built modules are not transferable and, even worse, dkms builds
>  as root without ever asking the user about it. I for one was pretty angry
>  to get surprised by drbd8-source suddenly starting to compile on my
>  system, while I'm very cautious not to risk its integrity by doing
>  "unsafe" procedures as root - and there've been enough stories of bad
>  Makefiles replacing /dev/null with a regular file and similar unwanted
>  side effects. That said, dkms' biggest assets of semi-automatically
>  adapting to new kernels could be trivially ported to plain
>  module-assistant:
>  - Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.berlios.de/fullstory/dmakms/trunk
>  - Vcs-Browser: http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/fullstory/dmakms/trunk/
>  - http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/10/msg00876.html
>  but again, this is my very personal opinion)


I took note of this and wrote a patch for DKMS to not build as root when
possible:
http://linux.dell.com/git/?p=dkms.git;a=commit;h=e2a638e6dca5c12db680cbcea1aff55298decbf4

It is conditional, as on RHEL and F11 it appears that this doesn't work.  It
works properly for Ubuntu (and I'd expect Debian too).

Including the module in the packaging system is a more complex problem.  I'd
too like to solve that, but that discussion should be raised on
dkms-devel at Dell ML or the dkms Debian mailing list.  I'm on both, and
open to ideas.

>
> Once we have a hal aware lirc version in svn, this is likely to be
> relatively easy to accomplish. DKMS might be a little problem, but can
> probably be worked around in the packaging.
>
I've got a few more patches to submit, but I'm waiting to see how many more
of these can get directly upstream first.

-- 
Mario Limonciello
superm1 at gmail.com
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