On 12/19/06, Buchan Milne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Monday 18 December 2006 21:21, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Mainly the 3rd party addons should be documented/listed.
> Most users don't know what has been added.
> I only happen to know these things cause
> some time ago i did rebuilds of mandrivas kernel for myself,
> so i know most of those additions.
>
> Mostly it comes down to the point that new users
> want to compile things manually, and then i see that the module
> they need is already in mandriva kernel.
They don't run 'modinfo <module>' first ? IMHO this is a mistake of upstream
module authors, they should always recommend that the user first check
whether the module is available (and the version, if that is critical, as in
less mature drivers).
Documenting 3rd party modules is one thing. Thanks to the previous
mail, I wrote these two command-lines and it gives some interesting
results :
find /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/3rdparty -name "*.ko.gz" -exec
basename '{}' .ko.gz ';' > ~/3rd_party_module
for a in `cat ~/3rd_party_modules`; do echo -n "$a :"; modinfo $a |
grep description; done
But there's still several problems :
1) 3rd party modules without description : what are they ?
2) Hardware support is one thing, but everybody knows you have to make
some choices during kernel compilation. Important choices should be
documented somewhere (and no, "zcat /proc/config.gz" isn't enough)
3) None of these things are mentioned in a manual (choices and 3rd
party modules) or even a readme file. That's exactly what the bug
report is about. Having the necessary information using a specific
command-line isn't enough. Harddrake may be another good place to
mention these "hardware" things.
4) To Buchan : No users don't type anything before they start
compiling. They should read the documentation and that's the only
thing they know, so that's the place where we should start writing
things.
