David S. Miller wrote:
> Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 21:24:25 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>
>
> Hardware vendors can not expect users to know about compiling. It
> would be very dangerous to have hardware vendors supplying whole
> kernel upgrades, but what else can they do?
>
> There really is not a whole lot preventing the "install" script
> on a driver cdrom from building the kernel module from source.
> It can even pop up a little "building driver module" dialogue
> with a cute little thermometer moving along as the thing builds
> itself. :-)
>
> The one thing preventing that would be if no compiler tools at
> all are installed on the user's machine. And that would be
> the one issue preventing this scheme from working.
>
> It then would not matter if the user was using kernel-2.2.x from
> Debian, or Slackware, or whoever. It also would not matter if the
> person was running on a Sparc, a PPC, an Alpha, an x86, or whatever
> PCI based platform on which the card works.
>
> I mean, am I the only person for whom this strikes them as being
> desirable? :-)
Yes, this sounds like very desirable. However, I have experience with
compiling the 4-front intermediate layer. That was quite a hassle, and
it managed to fail in so many ways, that I do NOT expect anybody to
write a foolproof script that will manage to compile a kernel module
in all cases.
The 4-front script would report "something went wrong" when the
desired ".o" file doesn't exist after the compile attempt, which is
not helpful. Sure, it is a microsoft-ism: the user doesn't want to
know. (A friend had a "this device isn't functioning properly" error
on his microsoft machine this weekend. Now how am I supposed to
diagnose that? I guessed IRQ/DMA, slot-dependent conflict, and was
right: swapping cards helped.)
I think it is wrong: The user needs to know the reason why things went
wrong.
Roger.
-- ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 ** *-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --* * Common sense is the collection of * ****** prejudices acquired by age eighteen. -- Albert Einstein ********- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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