Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Fer's blog : binary - plug and pray?

There's an interesting post over at Fernando Herreras blog with some interesting ideas. It would be great if package management system would support more metadata (or do they now?) so one could store for example hardware ID's for driver packages which would be easy to find just by doing poldek --shcmd='search -p my_driver'.But this shouldn't be used by hotplug as such, only by the hardware detection tools.

Integrating it with a Linux Drivers portal would be also great but there must be a means to distribute those file to people who don't have Internet access and the portal itself should have a more distributed manner. The driver devs would just need to register their drivers there and they would be fetched by the portal itself without any user intervention {by means of an RSS/ATOM/whatever feed or a simple (more or less) script like pldnotify.awk}.

The sanbox infrastructure would have to be provided by the distributions itself, getting their info what packages to build from the site and sending feedback back to it with the location of those packages. With the state of the Linux kernel as it is today (as seen on kernel.org ) and the distributions theirself I think it would be nearly impossible to make such a centralized sandbox work - just to many patch/gcc incositencies so in the end this portal would be just for the few chosen ones which use the mainstream distributions. A decentralized system should work wonders, giving the driver authors instant feedback on whre it works or on which kernels/gcc it lacks a few issues (all the buildlogs could be sent to the portal and stored or sent to the driver devs)...

BTW I wonder if anyone reads this though...

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