[elrepo] RE driver update incompatibility issue

[John Hodrien]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:

> ok, so most of the package updates will happen when the "current" driver
> gets updated.
> This mitigates the (slight) issue, but only for people with modern
> hardware (who use and want the updated "current" driver anyway). Users
> who are on a legacy version will still uselessly download a new package
> each time current gets updated.
>
> Nux mentioned deltarpm, fine for rhel6 but not for rhel5 afaik?
>
> Don't get me wrong, I think this is an enticing idea, and there's no
> issue for me since most of my machines are on fast networks. I'm just
> trying to think this through and imagine the potential drawbacks before
> you commit your precious time and energy to it  :-)

I might be thinking this wrong, so forgive me if I'm backwards here.

Could the actual driver rpms be separate and not required by the 'intelligent'
rpm?  That way if you *knew* you wanted a particular driver, you could not
install the drivers you didn't need, but still install the intelligence, so at
the very least it could alert you that you were missing a required package for
your hardware.  You could even include a command in that would remove the
unused packages, so that your kickstart could do a nvidia-remove-unneeded in
%post.  You could pair that with a meta-rpm that
simply required all packages, if you still wanted a single yum install foo.rpm
that could install all the required bits.

jh