Supported hardware info in PLD rpms?

Jeff Johnson n3npq at mac.com
Wed Oct 10 18:17:38 CEST 2007


On Oct 10, 2007, at 11:45 AM, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:

> Here's a sample "find-provides" script as proposed by Fedora guys:
>
> https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum-devel/attachments/20070222/3eb6c059/find-provides.obj
>
> The proposition is to include it in all rpm-based distros. What it
> does is simple - for each kernel module add Provides with a matching
> modalias. The goal is to allow managers like poldek to automatically
> find needed packages for detected hardware.
>
> More background:
>
> https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum-devel/2007-February/003233.html
>

Note that find-provides scripts are not invoked by rpm unless  
AutoReqProv: no
is specified, which has additional consequences for multilib packaging.

The find-provides scheme "works" only for kernels.

Do you really want or need to remap modules compiled into the
kernel (or kmod additional drivers) automagically?

If you really want dependencies on hardware, then /sys or /proc file  
info
should be directly mapped into a run-time dependency probe as a  
Provides:.
E.g. The contents of /proc/modules might be used to satisfy a
     Requires: procmodules(bluetooth)
for systems actually using bluetooth. And the dependency can be made
"soft" by specifying as
     Requires(hint): procmodules(bluetooth)

But additional semantic conventions would need to be added to poldek
and other depsolvers. I'm not sure the conventions proposed by Fedora
are any better (or worse) than other conventions. For one thing, Fedora
appears to be on a "No kernel module packages." agenda.

Specifying a provides for a kernel module is rather different than  
supplying
a provides for actual hardware. Module dependencies could also be mapped
into file dependencies if the path were globbed; the kernel version in  
the
path is all that prevents a file path from serving in lieu of a module  
dependency.

rpm already has file probes that look like
     Requires: exists(/path/to/somewhere)
Adding a glob on path, and generalizing the access(2) test to be a loop
over all globbed results would be the approach I would take instead.

73 de Jeff
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