Proposal: pci_driver() tags for dkms rpms

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 16:11 -0600, Michael_E_Brown at dell.com wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Matt Domsch [mailto:Matt_Domsch at dell.com] 
> > Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 9:15 AM
> > To: Brown, Michael E
> > Cc: dkms-devel-Lists
> > Subject: Re: Proposal: pci_driver() tags for dkms rpms
> > 
> > On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 10:58:29AM -0600, 
> > Michael_E_Brown at dell.com wrote:
> > >    Problem statement:
> > >            Given a yum/apt/rhn/etc repository containing 
> > DKMS RPMs, it is not
> > >    possible to figure out which RPMS are required for any 
> > specific system in
> > >    an automated way.
> > > 
> > >    Proposed solution:
> > >            Add a "Provides:" tag to each RPM for each 
> > device supported,
> > >    automatically generated by DKMS. There are two formats 
> > for these tags. One
> > >    is for standard PCI devices, and the tag format is one 
> > of the following:
> > > 
> > >      1) 
> > pci_driver(ven_0xNNNN_dev_0xNNNN_subven_0xNNNN_subdev_0xNNNN)
> > >      2) pci_driver(ven_0xNNNN_dev_0xNNNN)
> > >      3)
> > >      
> > pci_driver(ven_0xNNNN_dev_0xNNNN_subven_0xNNNN_subdev_0xNNNN)/
> > system(ven_0xNNNN_dev_0xNNNN)
> > >      4) 
> > > pci_driver(ven_0xNNNN_dev_0xNNNN)/system(ven_0xNNNN_dev_0xNNNN)
> > >
> > >            Anybody have thoughts, questions, additional ideas?
> > 
> > I'm inclined to like the idea.
> > 
> > How would yum and up2date handle the case of multiple kernels 
> > providing the above tags, and multiple kernel module packages 
> > (DKMS format, Novell format, Fedora format, ...), any of 
> > which would be present in the universe of repositories seen 
> > by any single system?
> > What's to guarantee that the "right" package providing this 
> > would get pulled in, given multiple providers, and what's the 
> > definition of "right" ?
> 
> Sorry, no good answer here. Yum does the wrong thing in response to
> multiple packages providing a dependency.

Yum has to make a arbitrary decision when this happens, and will pick
the package with the shortest name I believe. I don't believe it's a
problem though because any given system should not be pointing at
repositories containing packages inappropriate for its own distribution,
so there shouldn't be Novell format packages in a Fedora repository for
instance.

Paul.