On May 21, 2005, at 6:25 am, Doug Goldstein wrote:
Stroller wrote:
Hi,
..... farrrrr tooooo long.............
Yeah, sorry... I've always been pedantic. It's a real hard habit to
shift.
In summary and simple conclusion, yes you are wrong. So that makes 2
out
of the 4 or 5 active Mobile herd devs who say you're wrong.
Sorry again. Maybe I didn't make myself clear. I didn't mean to say in
my posting "I'm right", but rather I intended to ask:
Surely a user who emerges prism54-firmware will depend upon
wireless-tools?
"The firmware itself does not depend on wireless-tools for operation.
DEPEND/RDEPEND/PDEPEND in ebuilds are not for what you might
want to use along with the package in question - it is for technical
dependencies such as libraries and utilities."
Ok... so you're saying that the way to resolve this is to have a
variable called USER_WILL_DEPEND or similar?
....The firmware, which in 2 of these
cases are in seperate packages, do not depend on wireless-tools.
Y'see I'm just not getting why not.
A user can install Gentoo, compile the prism54 drivers in to his
kernel, emerge the prism54-firmware ebuild and not have
wireless-tools. Yet having emerged the prism54-firmware the user has
indicated to Portage that, yes, indeed, he intends upon using a
wireless network card.
As I understand it, the firmware can be uploaded to a wireless card
without the wireless-tools, but nothing useful can be done with either
the wireless card or the firmware without it.
Are you telling me this understanding is wrong?
The distinction between driver & firmware kinda dawned on me whilst
writing my original email, but I don't the practical implications. The
user needs wireless-tools in either case, right?
Is it the case instead that using DEPEND, RDEPEND or PDEPEND would
break something else if used to indicate the user's need? Hence a
variable called USER_WILL_DEPEND would be more suitable?
This is just melting my head, because I just don't see what I've got
wrong here - both you & brix have told me so, so you must be right.
Could you please explain more slowly for me?
And for
a last example which I just thought of... ndiswrapper acts the sameway.
Considering the Windows drivers are more of a "firmware" and
ndiswrapper
is the driver.
Mostly for ideological reasons I tend to ignore NDISwrapper, but I see
that emerging it pulls in wireless-tools. This seems correct and
sensible to me - by emerging NDISwrapper the user has indicated that he
intends on installing a wireless card (right?), so the ebuild provides
him with the tools he will need to set its SSID & WEP key.
Stroller.
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