Hello. First, this is my first post to this list, and I am not subscribed, so in any replies please CC me. Second, many thanks to all that work actively on Debian, I'm a happy user.
The context is that I (and many others) have a thinkpad laptop, which has a set of packages dedicated to it in debian, that enhance the control over its particular hardware. The problem is that when I bought a thinkpad, there was no trustworthy way in which I could have learned about these packages, never mind figured out which apply to my particular hardware, kernel version and so forth. I'm pretty sure the same applies to other particular hardware configurations, such as the presence in a computer of irda, raid, usb... What I believe should happen is that when I install, an attempt be made to recognize the hardware present (I am not talking about adding more probing - just about matching the information that already exists to a list of models), and if a match is found, then various packages should be offered. As an straw-man implementation proposal, an awk script that matches lines from the output of lspci, and outputs the package names, plus an aptitude that shows only package it is told to would already give the user a good start towards making an informed decision. Ideally, this should not happen only at install time, but also when I upgrade the hardware, or new such packages are added, but it is most important at install time, for obvious reasons. BTW - in the very general case, what I'm proposing here is really collaborative filtering of packages, a-la Amazon - "people who installed this package also installed:...", which would be cool. And no, popularity contest is not what I'm talking about... though the information it gathers could provide a basis for it. Daniel Vainsencher -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
