Bug#715398: please add a bbswitch-source package

[Russ Allbery]

David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian at gmail.com> writes:

> I guess the old arguments pro and cons for both are still mostly valid:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/02/msg00411.html
> Message-id: <4D58595A.3030201 at debian.org>

Ah, okay, some of the caveats around what kernels the module is built for
are interesting.

> For me personally, its mostly that I can't easily share the modules with
> people who I can't let modules install by themselves (dkms kills the
> module in each kernel version on upgrade of the module by design in the
> hope that the new version of the module will build as well. Thats rather
> misfortune if the module is needed for proper X or WLAN as you suddenly
> have no working configuration anymore if build fails)

I assumed that if you just built a Debian package of the module on a
single host with DKMS and installed that package on the other systems,
this would behave the way that you wanted.

> Beside, with my APT hat on it feels of course cleaner to have APT/dpkg
> in control of which modules are installed rather than a "module manager"
> – even if this manager was created by a big company and used by many
> distros.  (strawman: If that would be an argument, we should all be
> using rpm by now)

This objection also doesn't seem to apply to using DKMS to build Debian
packages.  I certainly agree for the default behavior that you get when
you install the -dkms package everywhere.

> m-a could really be better integrated, but most of it is available for a
> long time, just not by default (m-a cronjob, dmakms) …

My concern as a package maintainer is that it's kind of annoying to have
two ways to do this, and writing a good debian/rules file for m-a is
actually quite difficult.  (I keep encountering all sorts of weird
problems.  For example, one of my packages, for some reason, builds the
module three times over the course of a normal m-a build.)

Obviously we need some way to generate real Debian packages and not do ad
hoc compiles on every system.  But DKMS does actually have a mechanism to
do that.  It would be nice to be able to converge on a single system that
has all the required features.

All that said, I'm happy to continue to support m-a as long as it's
important to people.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>