Re: kernel-source and kernel-headers packages

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Brian Mays writes ("Re: kernel-source and kernel-headers packages"):
> Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> writes:
> > Can't these be retired ?
...
> > Why not just ship the (debianised, obviously) source to the
> > kernels we ship as .tar.gz and .diff.gz, just like any other
> > binary package ?
> 
> Here is one thing to consider.  The kernel-source .deb file includes
> processing scripts to keep track of installed versions of the kernel
> source (when several different versions of the kernel source have been
> installed) and points the /usr/src/linux symlink to an apropriate
> kernel source directory.  A simple .tar.gz file cannot do this.

The /usr/src/linux symlink is no longer necessary for anything very
much, and in any case it seems to me that having the
most-recently-unpacked thing alway set this link to itself is bad.

But really the main problem is that a .deb package is a stunningly bad
way of distributing source code - it's exactly the kind of thing that
dpkg (and indeed almost any package management scheme for binary
packages) will have huge trouble with, because people will always be
editing it, compiling it, rm -rf'ing it, &c.

Ian.