Re: Continuing to use old kernels for installation after point releases
* Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> [120131 16:17]:
> I have a setup at work which, amongst other things, regularly
> autoinstalls Debian. Because I don't want it to break unexpectedly, I
> prefer to keep using old installation kernels - for example, new
> kernels may have different requirements for non-free firmware etc., so
> I think it's not trivial to just use whatever kernel is in the most
> recent Debian point release.
>
> Alternatively, perhaps I and others (since it's not just me that has
> this problem) are just going about things entirely the wrong way. In
> which case I'd be happy to help update documentation or whatever but
> at the moment I'm afraid I don't know what the better way would be.
>
> The simplest solution, suggested by several people in the thread,
> would be not to remove the old udebs from the archive. I don't know
> whether that's possible, but no-one seemed to give an authoritative
> answer to that suggestion previously.
If you are installing stuff regularily, you might also want to consider
having your local mirror. If you freeze the udeb parts of this and only
trigger an update of that part manually once you also update
kernel/initramfs, you can be sure everything will still be the same.
(And together with some snapshotting one can also choose to revert
other changes in case they create problems).
(Though it would be even nicer if one could tell the installer to use
some snapshot directly, but I never understood the distribution
selection code of d-i and fear it is rather impossible).
Bernhard R. Link
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