There have been some changes to the Prism54 ebuilds in the last 6 months since I first installed Prism54 on a fresh system. At that time wireless-tools was a depend of Prism54. Now most users might expect to use the Prism54 module in the kernel and emerge only prism54 firmware [1] but it no longer seems to be so. This strikes me as odd, as surely the whole point of having Prism54 is to have a wireless network card?? Incidentally, Prism54 pulls in >=sys-apps/usbutils-0.9, by way of hotplug. Is this necessary for users with PCI wireless cards? I'm gonna go away & get all confused about coldplug now, too... [1] Even if they don't, and instead install the prism54-20050125 snapshhot, prism54-firmware is a depend of that. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Whups! Typo above. 2nd paragraph should read: Now most users might expect to use the Prism54 module in the kernel and emerge only prism54 firmware [1] but it no longer pulls in wireless-utils. This strikes me as odd, as surely the whole point of having Prism54 is to have a wireless network card??
The firmware itself does not depend on wireless-tools for operation.
So am I to understand that a prism54 card does not "need wireless-tools for operation" ? Because, whilst it may be the case that strictly speaking this firmware does not literally depend upon wireless-tools, the only possible reason for emerging this ebuild is to use a prism54 wireless card. It seems to me that a user of this ebuild does not need to tell portage at any other time that they're using a prism54 wireless card - IMO if wireless-tools is required to use a prism54 network card, then it would be sensible for this ebuild to say, "well, it looks like you'll need wireless-tools, too, let's pull that in, too". That was the former behaviour of the prism54-20040208 snapshot (before firmware & drivers were separated). I appreciate that Gentoo is not about holding the user's hand, and that Gentoo users should be reasonably clueful, but it seems unnecessary to make someone emerge 2 ebuilds when one will do the job.
DEPEND/RDEPEND/PDEPEND in ebuilds are not for what you might want to use along with the package in question - it is for technical dependencies such as libraries and utilities. The prism54 driver depends on wireless-tools for operation. Techically, the prism54-firmware doesn't need it.
Although there is (was?) a separate prism54 driver ebuild, it is also now in the main kernel, so it's quite possible that as user will compile it into their kernel or as a module & invoke no DEPEND/RDEPEND/PDEPEND for wireless tools. I appreciate that _technically_ one can install a wireless card & load this firmware onto it, then never use wireless-utils, but surely that would involve never using the card? Although this might not absolutely strictly literally be a "depend", is it not more user-friendly to have a user emerge only one ebuild insteda of two?
