Re: RFC: kernel packages cleanup
On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 05:23:56PM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> Hi, Stephen R Marenka wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 07:33:59PM +0100, Martin Schulze wrote:
> >
> >> m68k --> I heard there may be problems with 2.4 *sigh*
> >
> > The amiga port works with 2.4. The mac port doesn't, but people are
> > actively working on it.
>
> 2.4 may never support Macs, but 2.6 starts to look reasonably good on them.
Is there any ETA when there might be a good support in 2.6?
> It probably won't be ready for Sarge, but d-i runs on 2.2 (I installed one
> of my machines with it, last week) so we can always drop 2.2 support later.
If Debian 3.1r0 ships with kernel 2.2 you can't drop it in later point
releases.
Depending on the release plan and the ETA for a working 2.6 on Macs it
might perhaps be possible to include an installer without support for
Macs in Debian 3.1r0 and add support for them in later point releases?
You'd still be able to install Debian 3.0 and upgrade to Debian 3.1.
A bigger problem might be sparc32...
> Anyway, for purposes of security updates, part of the problem seems to be
> that m68k compilation is somewhat slow. To fix that, we can either accept
> that $SLOW_ARCH's security uzpdates will be late, or cross-compile the
> kernel on $FAST_ARCH.
No, the main problem for the security team is the manual work required.
Tracking three kernel trees (2.2, 2.4 and 2.6) would mean to collect
information on security-related bugs, fix them in the sources, recompile
all kernel images, test them and write advisories for three different
trees, and this would effectively require 50% more work than supporting
only 2.4 and 2.6. Since the kernel requires relatively many security
fixes this is a serious amount of extra work.
The compilation speed of the packages on several architectures doesn't
make a big difference (perhaps an advisory is released two days later,
but that's no additional work).
> Matthias Urlichs
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
Reply to: