[Pkg-dkms-maint] Need advice about module-assistant vs. dkms

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

pardon me for intruding on the maintenance mailing list, but I didn't
find any user-level medium for asking Debian- and DKMS-related
questions.

I am traditionally building my own kernels from vanilla sources. I do
so on a dedicated server system, and I have recently migrated from
make-kpkg to make deb-pkg in combination with module-assistant in
reaction to make-kpkg becoming deprecated by the Debian kernel team.

Just a few weeks later, virtualbox-ose, one of my most important
applications, became converted to DKMS in reaction to #551531, which
made me first aware of DKMS, and which prompted a number of questions
I am seeking to have answered. Unfortunately, since the source format
mandated by DKMS is rather incompatible to everything that Debian used
to have, thus breaking both make-kpkg and module-assistant.

(1)
According to http://wiki.debian.org/KernelDKMS, a DKMSized kernel
module source package is supposed to build _and_ _install_ itself from
its postinst. While this fits a scenario where a single-machine,
single-user desktop probably needs the modules built for the local box
automatically, this doesn't fit my build-only system where no
out-of-tree modules are ever actually used.

(2)
When I try building the virtualbox-ose modules manually from the same
directory where a module-assistant call to build non-DKMSized modules
works just fine, the call to dkms build fails with a truckload of
error messages indicating that the build is probably being started
with incorrect include file path.

(3)
Does dkms support not building as root? All I need is a .deb for the
modules, so it would probably be fine to just use fakeroot to build
the .deb

(4)
How am I supposed to build my kernel module .deb packages in my
scenario?

Any hints will be appreciated. I am really stumped by the second
sudden change needed to my kernel/module build mechanism in such a
short time.

Greetings
Marc

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