[Soc-coordination] Proposal: Automatic selection of hardware specific packages

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Guillem Jover]
> I've had this idea in my head for long, but as never found the time
> to work on it, didn't feel appropriate to throw it to the wall and
> expect someone else to implement it. Anyway, it seems to me it might
> be a nice GSoC project, and not necessarily too complex. As I've my
> plate already full, I'm not volunteering myself for mentoring,
> though. I'm CCing deity at l.d.o as they should be in the loop and
> Petter as he was working on integrating package data into
> discover-data at some point in the past, which might be interested
> in mentoring.

Yeah.  Note that part of your propopsal is already implemented in
discover/discover-data, and the /sbin/discover-pkginstall script will
install hardware dependent packages.  It can for example install raid
monitoring software when a supported raid is detected.  It might
provide a starting point. :)

Keeping the mapping from hardware to packages up to date is a hard
problem without cooperation from the various package maintainers, and
some hardware is hard to detect, but for the easy stuff (PCI and USB),
the implementation is trivial.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen