Nice to have: partially unregistered nvidia-kernel and alsa-

[geophagus]

Whenever I install a new kernel version (eg: old=gentoo-sources-2.4.19-r10, new=gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r1) I need to remerge nvidia-kernel and alsa-driver in order to place the nVidia and ALSA drivers into the new modules tree.

Portage then removes the previously installed nvidia-kernel and alsa-driver ebuilds. This removes the nVidia and ALSA drivers from the old modules tree. This makes the old kernel somehow unuseable. But I like to keep the old kernel as a fallback option.

I know, I could set "AUTOCLEAN=no" in /etc/make.conf, but I generally like "AUTOCLEAN=yes". And I think it's not an optimal solution to edit make.conf before remerging nvidia-kernel and alsa-driver and reset make.conf to it's original state after having finished the emerge.

I see three better solutions

a) Add a flag to emerge to temporarily override AUTOCLEAN (eg: emerge --[no]autoclean)

b) Create different slots for nvida-kernel, alsa-driver, and may be other kernel modules. One slot for each directory in /lib/modules/.

c) Don't keep track of files placed to /lib/modules/. Portage doesn't know about most files placed into /lib/modules/. So it wouldn't hurt if it doesn't register the nVidia and ALSA modules too.

What's your suggestion? My preferred solution is (c)

[blakes]

I have a laptop, and it seems I can't have multiple kernel versions (I was trying vanilla-sources-2.4.20 and gentoo-sources-2.4.20) to dual-boot to, and have alsa, and pcmcia-cs work on each one. Seems it just works on the last tree I did "emerge pcmcia-cs and emerge alsa-driver" on.

You have my vote for option (c) then also

Blacks