Re: [gentoo-dev] Pending Removal of $KV

[Arek (James Potts)]

Alec Warner wrote:
> Georgi Georgiev wrote:
>> maillog: 19/06/2006-11:13:33(+0000): Alec Warner types
>>
>>> Portage currently exports $KV as the current kernel version.  We
>>> detect this by attempting to mess around with the things in
>>> /usr/src/linux (.config, make files, etc...)
>>>
>>> This is duplicating the superb efforts of the kernel team and of
>>> linux-info eclass.  As such I would like to deprecate $KV in favor
>>> of using linux-info eclass.  I don't see the need for portage to
>>> export $KV into the environment for all packages.
>>>
>>> There are a few packages left that use this.  There will be a
>>> tracker bug shortly.  Mostly this mail is just a heads up ;)
>>
>>
>> But any kind of checks against something in $KERNEL_DIR are just wrong,
>> wrong, wrong. The only exception being when the ebuild is building
>> something *against* those sources (kernel modules, and that's it).
>>
>> It's annoying to have virtual/linux-sources pulled as a dep of gnupg,
>> iptables or any other package that can do fine without them.
>>
> In many cases those packages are looking for a specific kernel feature
> to make sure support is enabled for it.
>
> You could argue that in the case where you aren't compiling against
> the kernel that support being enabled isn't critical, but that is a
> discussion you need to have with the package maintainers.
Hmmm....I don't know about this, since I'm jusr a user without much 
programming experience, and haven't developed anything that makes use of 
kernel features, but If they don't actually build against the kernel, 
couldn't/shouldn't they look at either kernel-headers or the output of 
`uname -r`  (possibly with a way to force the feature on if the user 
knows it's available but the build system isn't detecting it)?

--Arek

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