roadmap for future kernel upgrades
Those of you who have tried to run a 2.1 kernel with stock packages
will no doubt have noticed that the upgrade path is somewhat less than
smooth. Well, this is partway to being fixed, but it still isn't a
pretty process. The steps to doing it smoothly are (or rather, will
be, when everything is done) as follows. The rules are simple - doing
any step without completing all the proceeding steps will probably
leave you in a less than optimal position.
0) Upgrade your 2.0 kernel to a new 2.0 kernel
1) Upgrade libc
2) Upgrade a bunch of utilities, first and foremost dpkg
3) Upgrade your kernel to 2.1 or 2.2 (or...)
Notes. Step 0 is interesting. There's a bug in the alpha kernels
that has only been fixed as of 2.0.36pre12. Probably the best thing to
do, although it will be an unpleasant amount of work, will be rebuild
the disk images with 2.0.36 when it comes out (which should be rather
soon), so any new users don't have to wrestle with this. The rest of
us will have to do this manually.
1 and 2 can be done together, provided the dependencies are right -
once you're running a new kernel, an 'apt-get upgrade' will do it all
nicely, and you won't even notice. Unfortunately, if you're running an
older 2.0 kernel, you'll notice rather rapidly, because dpkg will stop
working. It would be nice to make the new libc depend on a new kernel,
but I have no idea how to do it.
Once this is done, things will work and keep working regardless of
what kernel you run (in theory). Comments?
m.
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