Leigh Scott wrote:
For the record, you link only the nvidia-kmod change here, but the same
change was also applied around the same time to all the other kmod packages,
in both free and nonfree.
I believe there may have been a brief discussion between kwizart and
me on
IRC. They were dropped due to workload and lack of active maintainers'
look at the stats.
That is very intransparent. Was the decision even announced to the user
community?
(I do not currently use any kmod or akmod packages, so I might not be fully
up to date on the documentation. I have used some kmod packages from the
free section in the past, at least kmod-qc-usb and kmod-kqemu, which are now
both obsolete and removed. But at least I do not remember the change having
been announced.)
Users would still need a compiler to install the nvidia.run file if
we
stopped providing nvidia or all other kmods.
Of course. That goes for all packages, not just kernel modules. It is not a
valid argument against having a binary package. The whole point of having
binary packages is that we do not all need to compile the same unmodified
software ourselves, wasting time and energy, and leading to errors being
detected only on end user machines.
It is great that Free Software allows us to recompile it at any time, so
that we can make any changes we want, but if we are not going to change the
software, why do we want to recompile it? And non-Free modules such as
nvidia cannot even be meaningfully modified to begin with, making it even
more pointless to recompile the glue code on the user's machine.
I don't have any spare time due infra and release tasks, you can
do the
kmod rebuild tasks if you want them back?
I'm with Ty Young there, this needs to be automated. This is really a
textbook case of continuous delivery.
Kevin Kofler