DKMS 2.0.19 is out. The big improvement here is that Fedora rawhide (will be Fedora 9) now includes rpm hooks, similar to Ubuntu's triggers, to invoke the DKMS autoinstaller at the end of an RPM transaction when a new kernel is installed. This means we don't have to wait for a reboot to invoke the dkms_autoinstaller – it is now invoked right after a new kernel is installed, so can rebuild drivers immediately and include them in the initial ramdisk. This makes it easier to update storage drivers in particular. With any luck, when you install your new kernel, the DKMS autoinstaller will see that you have an even better driver in the kernel than DKMS is managing. If so, it won't install the "older" driver. This encourages people to get their needed fixes into kernel.org and thus into their distribution's kernels.
Thanks to the Ubuntu kernel team for devising the method for hooking into linux-image deb installs and uninstalls, and to the Fedora kernel team for implementing the same hooks (so as to not reinvent the wheel needlessly). I hope few packages will need this feature, but DKMS definitely benefits from it.
I've built this for Fedora rawhide, and will build it for F7 and F8 shortly. Watch for it in the updates-testing repositories.
For Ubuntu Hardy, I've missed the deadline for including this version. But that's OK, Hardy has 2.0.17.6. There is only one change here relevant to Hardy: with 2.0.17.6 and earlier you should invoke the mkdeb command as:
LANG=C dkms mkdeb …
to avoid the wrong date string getting put in your debian/changelog file.
git: http://linux.dell.com/git/dkms.git/
tarball: http://linux.dell.com/dkms/permalink/dkms-2.0.19.tar.gz
http://linux.dell.com/dkms/permalink/dkms-2.0.19.tar.gz.sign
RPMs: http://linux.dell.com/dkms/permalink/dkms-2.0.19-1.noarch.rpm
http://linux.dell.com/dkms/permalink/dkms-2.0.19-1.src.rpm
DEB: http://linux.dell.com/dkms/permalink/dkms_2.0.19-0ubuntu1_all.deb