It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware +related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically. +So I implemented one, using +my Isenkram +package. To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and +run tasksel as user root. You should be presented with a new option, +"Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)". When you +select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for +the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.
+ +
The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry +description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of +packages to install. The first part is in +/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc and look like +this:
+ ++ ++Task: isenkram +Section: hardware +Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram) + Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are + proposed. +Test-new-install: mark show +Relevance: 8 +Packages: for-current-hardware +
The second part is in +/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware and look like +this:
+ ++ ++#!/bin/sh +# +( + isenkram-lookup + isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l +) | sort -u +
All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it +trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to +have installed on our machines. I've not been able to find a way to +get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install +before doing the installation. So if you are curious or careful, +check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.
+ +The information about which packages are handling which hardware is +fetched either from the isenkram package itself in +/usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package +database (using the Modaliases header). The APT package database +parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs +#719837 and +#730704). The cause is in +the python-apt code (bug +#745487), but using a +workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and +reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to +around 2 MiB per hardware detection. It should make the desktop +daemon a lot more useful. The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to +unstable today.
+ +I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in +Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to +use the AppStream data source for this. A proposal for getting proper +AppStream support into Debian is floating around as +DEP-11, and +GSoC +project will take place this summer to improve the situation. I +look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to +start using the information when it is ready.
+ +If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either +add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in +the pymissile +package or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram +package. See also +all my +blog posts tagged isenkram for details on the notation. I expect +the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the +moment I got no better place to store it.
+ +