Hacking modversions

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 00:36 +0100, Fernando Herrera wrote:
>> Users can't, won't and shouldn't have to understand things like this.
>
>	Agree. I was thinking in some autopackage module/tool or so, just
>automagically invoked after the kernel update and saying ("we are
>updating your system: WebCam XXY driver....[=====   ]")

Right, but I'm not really sure we want to require a C compiler and
-devel packages on Sally's system. In fact, I'm quite sure we won't want
that. Leave that to 3rd party repos.

>> >But if Sally bought a webcam
>> >that is not supported by the standard kernel, should we say to her
>> >"Don't use linux, use Windows"?
>> >
>> 
>> Can someone explain to me why this is not a package management problem?
>
>a) 3rd party Open Source kernel module maintainers cannot manage so many
>packages for so many distributions.

Hence why it needs to be sort of automated. 

Another thought is that IHV's themselves can maintain such repositories
(you may argue NVidia is doing just that) before their kernel hits the
mainline and/or vendor kernels since it can take a long long time even
for open source drivers from vendors to get into mainline.

But I hear what you are saying.

>b) That woudn't be inmediate. If Sally up2date magics update her kernel
>and she has to wait 4 days to get his webcam back working is a bad user
>experience.
>

No, she would wait four days for the kernel upgrade. Though this is
pretty bad if it's a security update. People can blame on a) kernel guys
not willing/able to maintain kABI; and b) users not using open source
drivers in mainline/vendor kernels.

An interesting data point is that update kernels in Fedora normally goes
to -updates-testing for quite a few days before they are pushed out.
This leaves a window for 3rd party repositories to catch up.

(and now I will get flamed for even suggesting to put usability before
security. Oh well.)

David