Perhaps devices like this (which may or not be present) should just not
be marked as "hardware" in the database. Would that not work?
While that might solve the problem for PCs, it would then make these
packages optional for all other targets that use them. Which we don't
want to do.
The base problem is that the PC is an unusual target as far as eCos is
concerned. Most boards that have ethernet have the MAC in the
microcontroller or soldered quite firmly to the board. So there is no
question of it being changeable. The PC is different in that any PCI
card can be plugged in. So far we have coped with this quite
successfully by defining different targets for each supported ethernet
card. This is not particularly hard to do -- the ecos.db changes are
trivial compared with creating the target specific package and maybe
modifying the driver to work.
I'm not sure I really like the idea of compromising the functionality
of eCos simply to make a specific, unusual, target slightly more
convenient to use.