Automatic download and installation of drivers.

[Stamatis Mitrofanis <ewstam@softhome.net>]

Automatic download and installation of drivers. That is definately a 
good thing to have (in general). What we need now is to find:
- the best way to to use HTTP for the task.
- the best way to organize scripts/programs to have a general framework 
for requesting drivers of all kinds.
- actual database servers which are globally accessible to do the work.
- actual manufacturers to simply provide downloads in their ftp servers.

For HTTP there can be simple name=value requests that are passed to the 
server's CGI. The server redirects the client to where the actual file 
resides. The following holds:


wget http://www.kernel.org/cgi-bin/getdriver?bus=usb&pid=0x1234&vid=0x5678 <http://www.kernel.org/cgi-bin/getdriver?bus=usb&pid=0x1234&vid=0x5678>

Afterwards, the driver will get installed.

For the hotplug scripts I suggest that we create a new driver.agent 
which will process four actions (fetch/toss/install/uninstall) with 
appropriate parameters. It will be triggered by any other hotplug agent 
requiring a certain "resource" to satisfy an important request. The key 
thing here is that it should be acceptable to use the standard 
input/output of an agent.script when its called (like an ordinary 
program -- diagnostics should be sent to either stderr or syslog of 
course). This will be useful here since it's not very convenient to pass 
name=value pairs in the form of environment variables. Defining std 
input/output as "may be useful" for the hotplug scripts should be a good 
thing. install/uninstall get the DRIVER_RESOURCE parameter which is the 
local filename of the downloaded file. If a .tar.gz, they can guess the 
directory it unpacks to.

If anyone has any better ideas/suggestions, please let me know. I'm 
already working on the client-side for this (done install/uninstall for 
"targz.agent" driver subagent). It should be pretty easy to make the 
server-side DB and CGI linking to it.

Anyone to help?


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