[Pkg-pciutils-discuss] Re: Updating of pci.ids in Etch

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 04:26:28PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Sarge does not have a pciutils-udeb at all.
> 
> Etch d-i uses lspci in only two places:
> 
> 1. To determine the device name of a network interface.
> 2. To include lspci output in installation reports.
> 
> Neither of these seem like a very compelling reason to update the list
> frequently. The raw pci ID is the most important thing in an
> installation report, not the device name. Displaying device names for
> NICs is nice but not really essential.
> 
> I also wonder if stripping down the pci.ids file in pciutils-udeb
> further so it only covers NICs might be worthwhile to save space in d-i.
> 230k is still a lot of space for the above functionality.

Indeed.  How about compressing it?

-rw-r--r-- 1 willy willy 405596 Jun  6 08:02 pci.ids
-rw-r--r-- 1 willy willy 117665 Jun  6 08:02 pci.ids.gz

-rw-r--r-- 1 willy willy 234233 Jun 13 13:55 udeb/usr/share/misc/pci.ids
-rw-r--r-- 1 willy willy  75064 Jun 13 13:55 udeb/usr/share/misc/pci.ids.gz

It shouldn't be hard to bolt a gunzip decompressor into libpci.

The udeb's pci.ids is constructed by removing all the subsystem device
IDs from the main one.  It's a very simple script.  Martin's suggestion
of cutting it down to only the ones supported by the kernel fulfills the
first requirement, but leaves the second one a bit lacking.  In
particular, I think users who install on new hardware are given more
clues by having a name for a piece of hardware that the kernel *doesn't*
support!

By the way, Joey, thanks to 268031, we now have the ability to show
both name and number in pciutils.  Fingers crossed that that feature
will make it into Etch.  If it does, I suspect it'll make installation
reports more useful.