kernel module packages

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi Ville,

> > I've incorporated the feedback I received on my kernel module packaging
> > proposal and rebuilt the -devel package as well as the kernel modules.
> 
> Some observations, with the caveat that I haven't found time to dig too
> deep into this yet.

Please do.

> General documentation how to modify a upstream tarball to use the
> autotools stuff, and overall module packaging guidelines would be
> welcome.  There's the outdated draft in fedora.us Wiki which could be
> updated.

Will do as soon as interested parties (ie. you :)) agree the current
proposal is a good solution.  For now, the module example in autostars
(http://autostars.sourceforge.net/, under linux/) will do, together with
the three submitted module pacakges.

> smp is not the only kernel "variant".  There is also at least BOOT,
> bigmem, hugemem, debug, enterprise and uml in various distro versions.

For 2.4, this is not an issue - it already works.
For 2.6, I've yet to see variants other than i586/i686 and up/smp.  If
you have a link to these (I suppose the advanced/whatever versions will
have these), I can bundle kernel-module-devel for them too.

> Instead of bundling the m4/as-*.m4 in every package's *-autotools.patch,
> it would be better to provide them in an external package which the
> build depends on, for example fedora-rpmdevtools.

The reason I don't do this is because it's also my goal to submit
patches to upstream projects.  Too many kernel module projects each have
their own hackish build setup that only happens to work on the author's
machine without tweaking.  The set of patches makes them conform to a
generic autotools setup that I can hopefully get them to adopt.

> How to create a new kernel-module-devel package?  At least it needs to
> be documented, even better if scripted; that'd also make source
> verification easier.

It is; the script mentioned does just this.  It's pretty simple:
- download all the kernel rpms for all archs and types for a specific
kernel version-release
- put them in a subdir
- run the script

The script generates the tree you find in the already packaged -devel
packages.

Thomas


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