Thread: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
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rambo is offline rambo
2010-04-15 , 20:09
Posts: 540 | Thanked: 288 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#76
Originally Posted by ignarus View Post
I do not exactly understand why there should be a version mismatch as both kernels were compiled from the same source? But I must admit that I do not know much about how this version checking works exactly.
Because hotspot kernels version string is 2.6.38-hotspot and stock kernels version string is 2.6.38-omap1 (or something like that), titans kernel has again separate version string. This is done for a multitude of good reasons.

Originally Posted by ignarus View Post
I'm not sure that I understand what you mean here. What happens if another package which requires a custom kernel config needs to be installed. Let's say a package that needs usbnet supported. Then the maintainer of this package needs to recompile hotspot-kernel with the addition of usbnet? And would the package on which it depends still be called hotspot-kernel?

I don't think you should have a dependency to a certain kernel config. I've never seen it done anyway.
It's not a certain kernel config or even certain kernel package, it's certain kernel feature, and when the software will not work without said feature it must depend on it (or there is no sense packaging it at all).

This if why mobilehotspot depends on either hotspot-kernel or kernel-feature-netfilter, now titans kernel happens to provide said feature, hotspot-kernel also provides that feature but the dependency is listed like that to prefer the hotspot-kernel if no kernel providing the netfilter feature is yet installed (of course the hotspot kernel is not in autobuilder yet since I have been lazy and since titans kernel has much more features)

If there is a package that needs the usbnet module then it should specify that dependency in some commonly accepted way (like the kernel-feature-xxx that we coined with titan) and if maintainer of same package happens to maintain a package that provides this module to stock kernel then his package should state that it provides said feature (again the dependency can be stated as his_package | kernel-feature-xxx to prefer his).

He could also compile the usbnet module (since it's one of those that are easy to compile afterwards and the ko insers fine since it does not depend on anything changing in the kernel proper) for the hotspot kernel too and name that package hotspot-kernel-modules-usbnet (or something along that line) in case he feels that people using the hotspot kernel are better served by this than switching to titans (or some other kernel that provides both usbnet and netfilter features).

Getting a new feature enabled in titans kernel requires just informing him why this feature would be usefull (as long as it does not have weird conflicts with other features but generally usefull ones do not)