[packagers] dkms for kernel-foo

[Akemi Yagi]

On 8/23/07, Akemi Yagi <amyagi at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > Hi Dag,
> > >
> > > dkms has kernel-devel as a requirement:
> > >
> > > Requires: bash > 1.99, kernel-devel
> > >
> > > This is fine for the standard kernel.  However, in RHEL/CentOS, there
> > > are other types of kernels such as kernel-xen and kernel-PAE.  In
> > > these kernels, dkms fails to pull in the -devel rpm (e.g.
> > > kernel-xen-devel).  Is there any way to get around this?
> > >
> > > Akemi
> > > (toracat on irc)
>
> Looks like this is not an easy issue. I am pasting some notes from the
> centos-devel IRC for the record.
>
> <range>    toracat: I don't see a viable solution for that problem.
> <range>    At least not if you're using kernel-xen or kernel-PAE.
> <range>    *OR* you build dkms-xen, dkms-PAE and so on and let those
> require kernel-xen-devel, kernel-PAE-devel ...
> <dag>      toracat: I don't think that problem is solvable :/
> <dag>      I guess that's where Suggests or conditional requirements
> would come in
> <range>    Suggests won't help, conditional requires would.
> <range>    But ...
> <toracat>  "OR" in the Requires ?
> <range>    toracat: As those *ALL* provide kernel-devel, you won't win
> much with that. And there is no "OR" there either.
> <dag>      range: you could do at least something like: (kernel-devel
> and kernel-pae-devel) or (kernel-devel and kernel-vm-devel)
> <dag>      not that I think this is particularly clever
> <range>    dag: Well, it won't pull in the related kernels, but ...

For dkms to be useful in CentOS, this problem really must be resolved.
 More people are reporting problems. The last incident was someone who
was running c4's kernel-smp.  We will soon have a series of
kernel-vm's  (e.g. kernel-vm, kernel-vm-smp, kernel-vm-PAE). I also
heard that centosplus kernels would be named kernel-cplus or some such
in a not so distant future.

Akemi