Re: General reply on the Debian ENBD package questions

Peter T. Breuer wrote:

>"Also sprach Bas van Schaik:"
>  
>
>>Currently I'm very busy finishing an academic year as a board-member of
>>a study association, as well fixing various problems at the office. In
>>    
>>
>
>That can indeed be overwhelming.  I really appreciate your efforts and
>the excellent result.  Everything looks to me to compile fine (there's
>even a .ko produced, in the debian/enbd directory, though I don't think
>it's put in a package aftwerwards).
>  
>
That's exactly what I mean: the packages in the repository are not the
ones I'm working with right now...


>>students, but I hope I can make some time to finish things off.
>>    
>>
>Perhaps you can say what needs finishing, and I or somebody else can do
>it? For the moment I am publishing the debian/ directory 
>in the enbd archive. Make -f debian/rules binary.
>  
>
I don't think many people can help me with this (it'll cost you much
more time to fix it, since I've designed the complete Debian build
process). Furthermore, I've got some (Dutch!) comments from friends of
mine on these packages...

>>Don't hesitate to make remarks on the work I've done, but don't expect a
>>quick fix or a quick answer at the moment. I will read all mail
>>concerning enbd, but mark it "unread" until I've got the time to
>>carefully take care of all issues found and questions asked.
>>I do want to make a quick remark right now: the "enbd-client-modules-*"
>>and "enbd-client-source" are already obsoleted, but still exist in the
>>package repository. A new "enbd-module-source", which is ready for use
>>with the Debian "module-assistant", is considered stable and replaces
>>the packages mentioned before.
>>    
>>
>
>Hmm ..  sounds mysterious!  It's supposed to put the module source in
>the kernel tree, perhaps?  Or in some place where module-assistant can
>get to it?  Clues to debian thinking in that matter gratefully received!
>
>I've just downloaded and compiled module-assistant. I suppose I
>could figure out what to do with it with a bit of helpful guidance
>from people out there!
>
>       module-assistant  is  the  command-line  tool for handling
>       module-source packages that have  been  prepared  for  the
>       Debian  distribution.  It helps users to build and install
>       module package(s) easily for one or more custom kernels.
>
>but the rest of the description is deeply strangely obscure! In partcular
>I don't see that it compiles standalone modules.
>  
>
It's a fairly easy concept for the end-user, but not really that easy to
implement being a starting package maintainer. The m-a expects the
module sources and build scripts in a predefined way in a Debian
package. After installing the package (using apt-get, dpkg, or
"module-assistant auto-install") it should be able to build the module
sources against the running kernel only requiring the kernel-headers
package. This way you don't need to go through the complete kernel
rebuild process and (maybe even more important) you can stay up-to-date
with recent security fixes.

-- Bas