[driver-updates] [RFC] Automatic driver package resolution

[Michael E Brown]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 08:10:02AM -0700, Paul MacKay wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 07:36 -0600, Michael E Brown wrote:
> > 
> > Do you agree with the approach and proof of concept posted? If so, we can work on adding this to FC7 as enabling infrastructure and then write the GUI on top of that.
> 
> We have a slightly different approach at Novell/SUSE. Putting the
> modalias stuff as provides seems to be the wrong place. We place such
> information in Supplements portion of the RPM preamble and with changes
> to createrepo such information is available via YUM to updater software.
> Also, we use hwinfo for hardware detection which is passed up to perform
> package to hardware matching.

Thanks for the input, Paul. 

Several issues here:

1) Fedora does not have "Supplements". I dont know if this is SUSE-only or not, but it wont work for Fedora unless Fedora and Suse come to some sort of agreement about "Supplements". The other problem is legacy handling. I need to provide (representing Dell here) packages that work with RHEL4/5, SLES 9/10, and (unofficial, unsupported) Fedora 6/7.

2) Conceptually, I believe that the kernel driver "Provides: <a driver for modalias(foo)>", more than it "Supplements: modalias(foo)". I am open on this one, though, assuming we can overcome (1) above.

Any way to handle this discrepancy? My goal: be able to create KMP packages for SLES/RHEL/Fedora with hardware tags so that we can write a tool to automatically detect hardware KMP packages for hardware present on the system. It seems we are close on SUSE. I have not been able to figure out where you handle finding which packages are relevant for a specific system. I looked through the libzypp source and saw a couple things, but not this.

Next, the hwinfo comment. This program/library is not present on Fedora/RHEL (by default, as far as I can tell.) But I dont see this as a problem. The modalias proposal relies on more-fundamental layer that the kernel provides. Since this is so low-level, this approach should work across all distros.

--
Michael