Re: FW: press release - new network driver architecture

[Rogier Wolff]

David S. Miller wrote:
>    Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 21:24:25 -0400 (EDT)
>    From: "Albert D. Cahalan" <[e-mail]>
> 
>    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.

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