In principle, I agree with you that depmod handling it is better.
The only justification as "better" that I can offer (FWIW) is the
fact that it is more luser-proof. i.e. I see a lot of posts and
e-mail from people like "I tried to load the ne driver but I got
ei_interrupt and some other things undefined..."
Assuming distributions ship with kmod enabled (they should, since
they did with kerneld) then a novice user struggling with initial
configuration will no longer get a meaningless message like this.
If kmod support is not enabled, then "normal" depmod behaviour
is still used (with zero extra lines of compiled code). Furthermore,
kmod-aware 8390 based drivers can be used on a non-kmod kernel and
vice-versa. And finally, as a fall-back, the whole thing can be
disabled (ie normal depmod usage in all cases) just by nuking the
one line #define LOAD_8390_BY_KMOD
So some thought did go into it and it wasn't totally a random hack :)
Paul.
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