Re: [gentoo-dev] Speaking of new kernels being added to the tree

["Sami Näätänen" <sn.ml@bayminer.com>]

On Sunday 05 October 2003 18:53, Luke-Jr wrote:
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> On Sunday 05 October 2003 02:47 pm, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> > > I although don't suggest that -src
> > > suffix, but an option to the emerge, which tells it to install
> > > this software to package's SLOT="$P-src", from which I then could
> > > be looking in $PORT_SRC_DIR/$P-src.
> >
> > Agreed here. An option to emerge is much more intuitive.
>
> However, it prevents packages from DEPENDing on it. For example, if
> the kernels were to ever use the genkernel thing, nvidia-kernel might
> DEPEND on nvidia-kernel if it actually needed the source for it. I
> also don't think it should automaticly provide the package it is the
> source for until the user uses ebuild to install/merge it into the
> system.

Those modules can only be compiled to kernels that already has a
dependecy information made. So in older kernels this means make dep and
never kernels needs the config process done. After this point the
kernel include dir, which these packages need can be used.

The guestion is how would we manage the finding of the kernel include
dir for the source installed version. As I proposed the env variable
could be used if the user want's to build the package for different
kernel than the currently running kernel.

This would be good in other perspective too. Say we install new kernel
linux-2.6.0-test18 through this new version of portage. So it would
compile and install the kernel it's modules and the include tree. After
this portage could compile the module packages present in system to
this new kernel and add the module files to the module dir and to the
packages CONTENT file, so that all of the made modules would be removed
in a case where the corresponding package is removed from the system.
So Portage could set this kernel source variable to correct location
before compiling the module packages.

The variable should be kernel_includes or something, because that's
 what the packages need not the full source tree.
As an example the NVidia kernel module needs quite many header files to
determine the correct sizes of many kernel type definitions. And some
configuration information like was the kernel compiled with SMP support
or not. This all can be retrived from the kernel include dir and it's
sub directories.

> > > Oh and the kernel packages that would compile the kernel should
> > > install the kernel headers of the compiled kernel to
> > > /usr/src/linux-`uname -r`/include/
> > > so that any package that needs the real kernel headers can find
> > > them.
> >
> > Er, I'm pretty sure that the packages that need the source in
> > /usr/src/linux need more than just the headers - but don't quote me
> > on that!
>
> I can't think of any valid reason they would need to do so, but I've
> never done much of anything with the kernel.

Well that kind of perversive package will borke very fast.
And besides only thing I can think of that would need the kernel source
location is patch to kernel, but those should be delt before the kernel
installation not after.



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