[Pkg-pciutils-discuss] Re: pci.ids packaging (Was: Re: developer access)

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 02:35:26PM +0100, Martin Mares wrote:
> By the way, I'm currently discussing with SuSE packagers how should
> we update pci.ids files of packaged pciutils -- the release cycle
> of most distributions is much slower than the pace of hardware
> upgrades, so there should be a way how to update the ID list
> separately. We already have that -- the update-pciids script --,
> but it would be better to use the standard packaging mechanisms for
> that, especially because it avoids clashes between updates of the
> ID file and of the whole pciutils package.

Unsurprisingly, we've been discussing this within Debian too.
Last we talked about it was in the thread starting at:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-pciutils-discuss/2006-August/000067.html

> The current idea is to create a project at the OpenSUSE build server,
> which will provide automatically generated RPM's with just the pci.ids
> file and the distributors will then propagate these RPM's to their
> updates ocassionally. The users can therefore either download this RPM
> and have the ID file updated immediately, or wait for the next update
> cycle of their distro, both with consistent versioning.
> 
> Would you be interested in such a scheme, too?
> 
> And what about our colleagues from other distributions?

Obviously, we can't use an RPM.  Have we all standardised on the same
place to put pci.ids?  Debian uses /usr/share/misc/pci.ids, and while
this can't be changed for etch, I don't see why we couldn't change it
for whatever we've decided to call etch+1.  I don't know that we'd need
to use dpkg to create a .deb -- tar and ar should be enough.