[ATrpms-devel] Re: Changing foo-kmdl- to kernel-module-foo-? (was: Blackmailing ...)

[Axel Thimm]

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 02:41:03PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Thu, 6 May 2004, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > some of you may be aware of the thread below. To summarize Dag
> > explicitely broke compatibility with ATrpms in order to enforce his
> > kernel naming and versioning semantics. This is not nice.
> > 
> > Anyway, independent of blackmailing attempts, how do you feel about
> > changing the foo-kmdl- string to kernel-module-foo-? There are
> > drawbacks like
> > 
> > o ATrpms userbase has gotten accustomed to the kmdl naming
> > o kernel-module-foo-<kernel version/release>-<foo version/release>
> >   is non-intuitive and doesn't sort next to foo in guis like synaptic.
> > 
> > The pros are, that this scheme is supported by Panu Matilainen, the
> > Red Hat/Fedora apt guru (cced). Supported means that kernel upgrades
> > automatically perform kernel module upgrades.
> 
> Purely from technical point of view: there's no reason why the -kmdl- 
> naming couldn't be supported by apt as well, the biggest obstacle to 
> that in the current naming is that -smp (and -bigmem, dunno if there are 
> any of those) is moved away from the 'uname -r' part.
> Not saying it wouldn't be possible to handle that as well but the needed 
> "Lua-magic" is already hideous enough of a naming-hack as it is, it'd 
> rather avoid the guess-munge-guess-cut-guess-paste procedure :)
> 
> So.. unless I have missed something but it'd seem that just by changing 
> the naming from 
> alsa-kmdl-smp-2.4.26-1.ll.rhfc1.ccrma-1.0.4-22.rhfc1.at.i686.rpm
> to
> alsa-kmdl-2.4.26-1.ll.rhfc1.ccrmasmp-1.0.4-22.rhfc1.at.i686.rpm

Yes, that has been a pain also. When I chose to split off the flavour
from the kernel version/release, I did so in order to be compatible
with Red Hat's practice in naming kernels. E.g. you would take the
kernel name, and replace "kernel" with "kmdl".

I don't believe that this was worth it, as most people would prefer
doing apt-get install foo-kmdl-`uname -r` and have it working for
non-standard kernels, too (e.g. smp, bigmem, ...).

> ..would make it trivial to support this with the same Lua-script which 
> fedora.us apt uses. The only other issue I see is that the -kmdl- packages 
> still have "provides: kernel-module-foo" which IS going to confuse the 
> Lua-magic, IF you want to simultaneuosly use kernel-module-foo packages 
> from other repositories automatically.

I would have preferred to convince fedora.us and PlanetCCRMA to use
foo-kernel-module or foo-kmdl, in order to sort in synaptic kernel
module rpms next to the main userland rpms, but I think nobody wants
to discuss kernel modules, as each time the discussion ends with blood
on the screens ... :(

So personally I prefer dropping cosmetical preferences for getting a
common (and working) scheme. Let's see what the people on this list
say. After all breaking the heritage with the kmdl scheme
will affect some of them (thinking especially of Jarod's
documentation).

(If we decide to change the scheme the old one will be provided as a
virtual Provides for backwards compatibility purposes, so even apt-get
foo-kmdl-... will continue to still work, or not?)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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