From: Alan Woodland (alan.woodland_at_gmail_dot_com)
Date: Thu Jul 23 2009 - 03:36:57 PDT
Hi, A Debian user has requested packages of BLCR. (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=529619) As a BLCR user and Debian developer, with a vested interest in seeing BLCR packages I thought I'd give it a go myself (I hope that's ok with you?). I'm in the process of packaging things, but I've got a few questions/issues I'd like to check up on: 1) Are the userspace parts (library, utilities and development headers) are independent of the running kernel version? They only depend upon a kernel module of the same BLCR version for the current running kernel correct? The package structure that fits best with the Debian way is to make libcr0, libcr-dev blcr-util, blcr-source (and on amd64 lib32cr0), as well as blcr-modules-KERNEL appropriate to the release. To build all the userspace bits I'm currently configuring with the '--with-installed-modules' option. 2) To build the blcr-modules-KERNEL the ideal solution would be to use module assistant (this means that even on custom kernels users could type 'm-a a-i blcr' and get a working kernel module automagicaly built for them. In order to do this there needs to be a cut down source tarball built, which lives inside the blcr-source package that can build the kernel modules for a given kernel. At the moment I'm just re-taring the whole of the BLCR source tree for this and then making module assistant call the whole configure script again, with --with-installed-libcr --with-installed-util --with-components=modules so that it only builds the kernel modules. Is there a nicer way of going about this? The configure script is obviously critical here, but can you suggest a nice way of trimming things down? Most modules seem to end up just shipping *.c and *.h required for the kernel module in this, along with a paired down makefile. I did wonder about moving the kernel space bits into a sub-tree and having configure call configure on a subdirectory, but that's a pretty substantial patch. Does this sound reasonable? Would someone be willing to test (and review?) this for me? I'd very much like to see BLCR in Debian, but I don't want to end up acting unilaterally! Thanks, Alan