Re: Maintaining kernel source in sarge
On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 09:04:05AM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> To make it more interesting, Matt Zimmerman revealed[2] that merging all
> kernel source packages would save space of one CD from our archive and our
> CD images.
I was probably exaggerating slightly; I did not do the calculations.
However, each kernel-source package represents 25M of binary and 30M of
source packages, which is a significant amount of space both in the main
archive and on the CD set, not to mention the benefits in simplicity and
maintainability.
> Since sarge is far from being released, now would be a perfect time to
> start working on consolidating kernel and source packages in order to have
> a new and much better working system ready for sarge when it is time to
> release.
Another thing that concerns me is the upgrade process. The practice of
overwriting the running kernel and modules results in a risky, interactive
installation process, and makes it impossible to back out to the old kernel
unless the user takes appropriate measures.
I noticed that the current 2.4.20 kernel-image packages in unstable have
taken a different approach. When the i386 kernel was updated to include the
ptrace fix, it was built as a separate binary package, 2.4.20-1-<subarch>
rather than 2.4.20-<subarch>. This allowed both kernels to be installed
simultaneously, and the upgrade easily reverted. Users who had installed
the kernel-image-2.4-686 metapackage were still automatically upgraded.
--
- mdz
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