Re: Getting newer kernels into stable

[Andrew Pollock <apollock@debian.org>]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 11:59:05PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Andrew Pollock <debian-lists-2004@andrew.net.au>
> > On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 04:14:16AM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> 
> > > Even if we issued an empty transition kernel-image-2.6.4 to pull in
> > > 2.6.6 (which is dangerous in and of itself), apt-get would not
> > > actually upgrade unless it gets 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.
> 
> > However, if a newly installed stable system installed the kernel-image-2.6
> > virtual package, an apt-get upgrade would upgrade the kernel if this virtual
> > package subsequently depended on kernel-image-2.6.6 instead of
> > kernel-image-2.6.4 (which is another spin on what you're saying above,
> > anyway).
> 
> (Hm, this makes more sense if you mean "meta-package" rather than
> "virtual package, right?)

Probably.
 
> Is this some new magic capability of apt-get? What exactly triggers
> it?  I thought that the distinction between ordinary packages and
> meta-packages was just in the heads of the developer and user (and
> also in the long description), but not actually known to any of the
> package-management tools.

See the kernel-image-2.4-686 package (for example).

regards

Andrew