Draft: Provide pci and usb sub-packages
For over a decade hwdata has been providing a consistent set of information - pci, usb, pnp and misc - by consolidating various upstream sources and applying a set of validation and verifications steps on top.
For a few years now, all Linux distributions apart from Debian have moved to only shipping hwdata-provided database files, so let's try this in Debian as well.
Update the hwdata to also provide pci.ids and usb.ids, as separate sub-packages, which brings the following benefits:
- fewer source packages, more shared maintainership
- identical database files, for a given version, across distributions
- use
/usr/share/hwdata/OOTB, drop manual overrides during build of other packages - ddcutil, lsusb-py, pciutils, fwupd, libgusb ... - keep a compat symlink to the old location as a fallback
- fewer entries in not-installed :-P
Signed-off-by: Emil Velikov emil.l.velikov@gmail.com
/cc the usb.ids, hwdata and pci.ids maintainers - @aurel32 @pino @guillem
Team, this proposal is inspired by aurel32/usbutils!1 (closed) and it serves as illustration how one can reduce the technical debt in Debian and avoid adding any into relevant upstream projects. While also benefiting from shared maintainership reducing the bus factor.
That said, you all know the intricate details of Debian's inner workings much better than me, so if there is a better way to achieve the goals please let me know.
Once there is a general agreement on the route, we can worry about the implementation details.
HINT: the MR needs to properly handle the Breaks/Replaces on usb.ids, plus the pci.ids ones could be off :-)
With this, or equivalent merged, one can start removing the explicit overrides [1] to further reduce the Debian specific workarounds. The pci.ids and usb.ids users can be migrated and the older standalone packages dropped.
I won't be volunteering for that part thought, unless asked :-)
Hope this helps, Emil