I have an at1700 card that only works with a driver that is not in the standard kernel tree; personally I think the driver in the standard kernel is broken, and should be replaced by the one I use, and have made comments to such an extent, but it seems that Donald (though it in no way diminishes his contribution) has this "infallability" reputation going on. He's spruced up the "official" driver from time to time (added MCA bus support). So the end result is the two modules (which were based off different card drivers to begin with) are hopelessly forked.
Anyway I reinstalled a new kernel the other day and decided that I was sick of pasting the alternate driver in, so it might be nice to package it somehow. Unfortunately these cards do not detect very well when loaded from a module, so it needs to be compiled into the kernel. A whole kernel package for this seems excessive though. What would be the best way to distribute it? Should Debian have a few "grab bag" precompiled kernel packages with various nonstandard features, or should there be a "source patch" package that can be installed along with kernel-source for this purpose? What's the right balance of "distro bloat" to user convenience? Anyone here dealt with a similar issue? -- Brian S. Julin
