On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 16:43 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 28 2009, Neil Williams wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:56:01 +0100
> > Patrick Matthäi <pmatthaei@debian.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Am 28.11.2009 18:52, schrieb Bastian Blank:
> >> > Hi folks
> >> >
> >> > The Linux image packages needs to do some modifications to core
> >> > configuration files like fstab in the future to allow newer kernels to
> >> > work. To do this and the planned further extension I intend to make all
> >> > linux image packages depend on python.
> >
> > This sounds like a maintainer-script issue rather than a direct
> > requirement of the image itself. Would it be possible for the scripts
> > to check for python support and continue *without error* if python is
> > not found? This way, systems that do not have python but *do* have a
> > setup capable of implementing whatever changes are suitable can still
> > use a vanilla Debian kernel, e.g. during debugging.
> >
> > Note 'suitable' - no matter what the kernel does or thinks it needs, it
> > is not necessarily suitable for the maintainer scripts to fiddle with
> > system config files on every system.
>
> Indeed. Editing configuration files that belong to other
> packages is a policy violation; and even editing configuration files
> blonging to he package itself must preserve all user changes.
>
> It seems to be that a better approach is to inform the user, and
> let the admin make the changes needed.
The specific requirement here is to prepare for a transition from old
PATA ("IDE") drivers to libata-based drivers. libata presents ATA/ATAPI
drives as SCSI devices, so hard drive partitions will change
from /dev/hdX to /dev/sdX.
In preparation for this partition, /etc/fstab and the kernel parameters
in boot-loader configs should be changed to specify partitions by UUID
or label name so that they work with both old and new kernel versions.
There will be a debconf question as to whether this should be done
automatically, but it is not appropriate to expect all users to make
this change manually.
Ben.
--
Ben Hutchings
Quantity is no substitute for quality, but it's the only one we've got.
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