[elrepo] Announcement: EL7 Updated kmod-nvidia package for RHEL7.6

[Phil Perry]

On 19/11/2018 10:41, John Hodrien wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Nov 2018, Phil Perry wrote:
> 
>> In the future I may deprecate/remove this feature so the plugin will 
>> only work (correctly) if all kernels are available, but I'd like some 
>> discussion about how best to handle this. I believe option (1) is more 
>> robust than any fudge / workaround I can implement and will allow the 
>> plugin to work seamlessly going forward, including on unsupported 
>> setups where people have stayed on older point releases. It doesn't 
>> matter whether we are talking now, transitioning from el7.5 to el7.6, 
>> or 6-12 months from now transitioning from el7.6 to el7.7, or for 
>> someone who for whatever reason has stayed on el7.4 (or whatever point 
>> release). The plugin should just work in all scenarios as long as all 
>> kernels are available to yum (in reality it doesn't even need to be 
>> all kernels, just the base kernel from each point release).
> 
> Personally I'd ignore the use case of people staying on old point 
> releases of
> CentOS.  This isn't a supported setup, and I think you should treat it the
> same way.
> 

Agreed, we have no intention of supporting that use case, but if the 
plugin also works in that use case (or at least does no harm), then hey, 
that's a bonus :-)

> Your solution sounds workable, and obviously people don't need to 
> install this
> plugin if they don't like it.  They have a workaround available to them 
> should
> they want the full benefit, but it'd require local repo rejigs, at least by
> including base kernels in a local mirror.
> 
> Assuming I didn't rejig the repos, and I was running machines on the 
> current
> point release, this would cause me no bother, as it'd not hide any old 
> kmods,
> as the only kmods considered for exclusion would be latest point release 
> ones.
> That right?
> 

Yes, that's correct, assuming (1) I don't decide to deprecate the 
workaround to ignore older kmod packages and (2) I update the plugin 
workaround for el7.6, ignoring kmod packages tagged as el7_6.elrepo, so 
it works similarly for the el7.6 to el7.7 transition.

At this point in time I'm inclined to remove the current workaround at 
some point in the future, just because it's a real ugly workaround and 
there has to be a more elegant solution. I'm also considering opening a 
bug against CentOS against yum behaviour which is different from that 
experienced on RHEL. I don't necessarily expect to get anywhere with 
that, but it's worth documenting and not unreasonable to expect yum to 
behave similarly on CentOS as it does on RHEL, especially when the 
difference in behaviour has the potential to break other things.

But I'll leave the workaround there for now so folks can use the plugin 
right now if they want to solve the immediate problem, and have time to 
consider how they want to best handle the transition from el7.6 to el7.7.

> Looks good to me Phil.
> 

Thanks John.