Bug#715398: please add a bbswitch-source package

[David Kalnischkies]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 9:09 AM, Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> wrote:
> David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian at gmail.com> writes:
>> 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.

I presume yes, haven't tried dkms built packages at all (and reading about
them it seems like they still need dkms by default #554843), I was just
horribly annoyed by the default behavior as described above a few days
ago and in the end bending m-a to my will was always easier than dkms so far.


>> 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.

The HOWTO of dkms contains "contaminate your system" to differentiate the
"default" mkdeb behavior from one with --dkmsframework (whatever that does)
Sounds scary, doesn't it?

My point here was more an ideological one based on the default behavior as
the default is what most people will do - and not completely serious either.

But anyway, I think the central sentence is:
> do that.  It would be nice to be able to converge on a single system that
> has all the required features.

And I can fully subscribe to that. I can fully understand that supporting
two (or even more) systems is quiet horrible from a maintainer POV –
and from a user POV as well as you really don't need a choice than all
you want is getting your goddamn hardware to work.
Really hope we can fix that soon, whatever the winner will be.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies