After the decision to remove linux-modules-extra-2.6 from Debian, it is now time to move all modules to a new method for compilation. Nothing is bad about module-assistant - beside the problem that you must know about it and understand how to use it.
Dynamic Kernel Module Support provides a
simple solution for the end user as it will handle recompilation after a new
installation of a kernel or a new module. The user only have to provide the
kbuild for his current kernel and DKMS will to the remaining magic. In a normal
situation DKMS should recommend to install the headers and makes it unnecessary
for the user to install it manually. This means that headers should be
available for dkms unless the user thinks different. If the user has
compiled his own kernel he must ensure that /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build
points to a valid build environment for the running kernel.
batman-adv-kernelland and batmand provide the modules batman-adv-dkms and batmand-gateway-dkms in addition to batman-adv-source and batmand-gateway-source. This was done to ensure that the user is in full control over the way he wants to build his modules - even if this means that he wants to build some modules with modules-assistant and some with dkms. It is different to the way Ubuntu is doing it at the moment, but there is no real Debian Policy or recommentation how to handle it until now. Only small examples were given how to write packages which supports DKMS.
It should also fix the problem that the version of my batman-adv-source package is nearly all the time newer then the binary package created by linux-modules-extra-2.6, but apt(itude) still wants to update to it instead of using the module created using module-assistant. A smaller glitch which got me some "bug reports" over private channels.
Lets hope that more packages (only three until now) will move on to dkms soon. It is only a matter of time before the bug #552369 is closed and all binary free extra modules will disappear from the archives. linux-modules-nonfree-2.6 was already removed, but there is currently no real reactions for the related bugs.