Re: kernel-source-2.0.35_2.0.35-2.deb
severity 28535 normal
thanks
Hi,
The kernel sources now ship as a tarball, not unpacked as they
used to; and no, this is not an oversight, but this is by design. I
gave up my struggle against the requests for the current behaviour,
and I now believe shipping packed sources is the way to go.
Most packages that need to have access to a particular kernel
headers seem to be kernel modules of some kind, and a mechanism has
been provided to kernel modules where they may be compiled whenever a
new kernel is compiled (anywhere on the file system) using
kernel-packages make-kpkg. If there are any other packages that
require an unpacked source, please contact me and the debian-policy
list.
My intent to change the packagingn has been mentioned on
debian-devel, and is mentioned in the Changelog of kernel-package,
however, I should have mede the changelog for kernel-source also
mention this, and I do apologize for that oversight. The changelogs
shall be modified on the next upload.
There has been a long standing complaint against kernel source
packages about putting the sources in a .deb format, the argument
being that the package can't be cleanly removed by dpkg. The
argument (I confess this is not one that I really understand) has
been that dpkg has not been designed for source packages (seems to
work well enough, even though the functionality be serendipitous),
and that there is a problem removing the package is there are
extraneous files in the directory (which is inevitable when on uses
the sources to create kernel images). Changing things to ship a
tarball addresses those issues.
There have been other reasons to ship sources as we do now:
a) dpkg can now remove the package easily, and this adddresses some
of the objections of the author of dpkg.
b) Less space is used by the package, the archives (I checked, we
save all of 5bytes), and indeed, on the target disk, since the
untarred sources maybe removed when done (this last saving is
indeed legitimate).
c) There is less pollution of /usr/src/kernel-source-<Version> and
/usr/src/linux names; therefore there is less interference with
what a user may feel like doing in the /use/src directory
(notwithstanding the fact that that directory is deemed vendor
space)
Earlier, there were additional reasons for shipping the
sources unpacked, namely, the sources could then serve as targets for
the /usr/include/{asm,linux} links. Howevern the new world order is
that libc6-dev ships with directries, not symlinks, and thus we no
longer have the need to ship an unpacked source tree.
The way it stands, people who need to do stuff with the
sources can easily unpack them into /usr/local/src, and have at 'em,
and need never muck in vendor dirs ;-)
As to the permission of the sources, the packing method
respected the maintainers umask; this is a bug, since the umask of
022 seems not to be universal ; I shall explicitly reset permissions
before packing on my next upgrade of kernel-package.
manoj
--
Kaufman's First Law of Party Physics: Population density is inversely
proportional to the square of the distance from the keg.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
Key C7261095 fingerprint = CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
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