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

[Aleix Pol]

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.

Aleix