Not quite sure what the question is, but I'll try to provide some background information on discover in the hope that it might answer at least part of the question.
The task today of the discover package in the installation phrase is to ensure hardware specific packages are installed. It ensure the software needed to configure RAID controllers or talk to smart card readers is installed automatically on machines with such hardware. It provide a binary package and a data package, and the data package contain XML files with mappings from hardware and kernel modules to packages in the archive. I believe this feature should be replaced with a system allowing each package maintainer to announce the hardware supported by a given package in the package itself, and have been work on this for a few years. Until a few years ago, this was the only source of mappings from hardware to packages in Debian. Since then, I wrote the isenkram system to do a similar task and more. The isenkram system in addition to the simple hardware->package mapping provide a user space daemon that will pop up a dialog when new hardware is inserted (think USB dongles), if there is some (not yet installed) package in the archive supporting the dongle. The isenkram system was bootstrapped with the information from the discover-data, and extended with more information I could find. Since a few weeks ago. The appstream system has been extended with hardware information, allowing isenkram since a few weeks ago to fetch hardware mappings from appstream. So far only one package use this in Debian (pymissile), but I hope to find time to send bug reports asking the other packages to list their supported hardware too. So far I have only done it for one package, The isenkram-cli package provide two tasksel tasks, which I suspect is a better approach for enabling the code to install hardware specific packages. If isenkram-cli is installed before tasksel is executed, the user get two options extra in tasksel, installing hardware specific packages, and installing firmware packages needed by the currently set of loaded kernel modules. My plan for the next release has been to adjust hw-setup to no longer install discover but install isenkram-cli instead, and move the hardware->package database from the isenkram package into the appstream metadata database. It is a judgement call when isenkram is good enough to replace discover, while still ensuring the Debian installation install the hardware specific packages needed to get machines working properly. Perhaps the time has come? Earlier, the discover package was useful for mapping hardware to kernel modules, but this has not been useful for several years as the udev system handle this just fine with the mapping tables provided by the kernel itself. Because of this, that part of the discover-data dataset has been ignored and can be removed. This was the original purpose of discover, but is no longer a useful part of its feature set. Did that answer the question? -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen
