Add drivers to Discover rather than all KDE distributions doing their own?

[Matthias Klumpp]

2018-02-27 15:52 GMT+01:00 Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>:
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 2:30 PM, Nate Graham <pointedstick at zoho.com> wrote:
>> + Aleix Pol, Discover's lead developer
>>
>>> On Feb 27, 2018, at 6:20 AM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 5:00 PM, Valorie Zimmerman
>>> <valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hello folks,
>>>>
>>>> It's the time in the Kubuntu release cycle where we are evaluating
>>>> everything that will go into our next LTS release at the end of April. We
>>>> have "KDE Config Driver Manager" which relies on Qapt, which nothing else
>>>> does. So we can try to port away from qapt and create our own solution, or
>>>> collaborate. We would prefer to collaborate.
>>>>
>>>> Is Discover a good way to handle this, or a distro-agnostic KCM? The Neon
>>>> devels have https://phabricator.kde.org/T2844 and we Kubuntu folks have
>>>> commented, but that effort seems to have stalled.
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> On the GNOME side, they've generally taken the approach that the
>>> software manager tools should integrate the requisite functionality.
>>> Their GNOME Software also handles drivers, though it requires
>>> AppStream or equivalent information (cf. fwupd, etc.).
>>>
>>> We should probably follow the same approach with Apper/Discover...
>>>
>>> And please, avoid ubuntu-drivers-common. That fork of Jockey only
>>> works with Ubuntu and its derivatives.
>>>
>>> There's an emerging cross-distro tool that you should look into called
>>> linux-driver-management. I maintain packaging for it for Fedora[1] and
>>> Mageia[2]. It comes from the Solus Project and is designed to be
>>> distro-agnostic. I'm actually working on some integrations for it for
>>> Fedora and Mageia tools myself.
>>>
>>> [1]: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/linux-driver-management
>>> [2]: https://madb.mageia.org/package/show/application/0/release/cauldron/name/linux-driver-management
>>>
>>> --
>>> 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
>>
>>
>
> Hi,
> Yes I agree that we probably want it in Discover, at least to some
> extent. It sounds to me that the discovering part isn't very
> interesting but we definitely need to make sure our users are using
> the latest stable versions of their drivers.
>
> Since I don't have a lot of time to work on this feature, I created
> this GSoC idea, we could extend it to other information as just one
> backend is possibly not enough for a GSoC. Extending it to also create
> an LDM backend would make 100% sense.
> https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2018/Ideas#Discover:_fwupd_integration
>
> Here's also a relevant wish ticket for fwupd:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354841
>
> Regarding the KCM, I'd say that if there's proper metadata it would be
> a good candidate to be adopted into Plasma too.

FWIW, AppStream supports drivers and firmware natively[1].
Having this in discover is just a matter of the distributions adding
the missing metadata, and Discover using the information properly to
detect which drivers need to be installed on the system.

Cheers,
    Matthias


[1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Metadata-Driver.html

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