Howdy again,
I am finding some more time to work on the kernel module plugin.

First off, right now I'm just working on the SL4 plugin.  I'm doing that 
mainly because we've got lots of kernel modules and I'm able to test 
lots of different situations.
As soon as it seems like it's doing what it's supposed to, I'll make 
those changes that are need to work on SL5.
For SL4 I am not going to merge the kernel-module and kdml into the one 
plugin.  This is because there are a few instances where both Axel and 
myself have the same kernel module packaged different ways.  I don't 
want to deal with figuring that out.
But I will merge them together for SL5.  and hopefully I'll be doing 
that soon.

OK, now on for the real reason I'm writting this.
In many of our kernel module packages we have

Requires:	 /boot/vmlinuz-%{kernel}

This basically is saying that this kernel module requires the kernel 
that is associated with it.
I would like to take that out.

Why?
Well there are a couple reasons.
The first is that it would help the yum plugin problem.  Currently 
before yum get's to the plugin section, it picks a kernel module at 
random (actually it looks alphabetical), it then see's that the kernel 
module needs a kernel, and adds the requirement to it's requirement 
lists.  We might be able to take the kernel module off the list of 
things to be installed, but we can't take the kernel out of the 
requirements.
The second is that it's not really needed during installations and 
upgrade.  Yum is working just fine with other kernel modules that don't 
have this dependancy.
The third is it might make installing easier for a user.  I know users 
that would be happy to just do "yum install kernel-module-madwifi*" and 
get all the kernel modules.  It's one step for them, and the extra 
kernel modules don't bother them.

Why would it be a problem?
Well, you don't get the automatic removal of the kernel modules when you 
remove a kernel.  But this really isn't that big of a problem.  So you 
have a kernel module just sitting in your file system.  There could be 
worse things.  We also could write a kernel module removal function in 
the plugin if this is a problem.
It would also be a problem because we would have to remake some kernel 
modules and rpm's.

Any opinions?

Thanks
Troy
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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LCSI/CSI DSS Group
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