Re: debootstrap and cdebootstrap vs systemd
-----Original Message-----
From: Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org>
To: Simon Richter <Simon.Richter@hogyros.de>
Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, debian-embedded@lists.debian.org, debootstrap@packages.debian.org, cdebootstrap@packages.debian.org
Sent: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 10:45
Subject: Re: debootstrap and cdebootstrap vs systemd
> You might want to stop accepting 2.6 as a base kernel version.
Apologies in advance. You really hit a nerve here.
Kernel 3.7 was released December 2012. Debian project created a dependency on this for the default init system roughly 15 months later. Which is fine, and perfectly understandable. It makes sense. I don't want to argue that.
But please don't make light of the situation for those who can't apt-get install hardware-redesign beg-silicon-vendor-for-updates port-and-re-validate-custom-undocumented-modules go-back-in-time-and-teach-hardware-engineers-linux-kernel-lifecycle
3.7 is less than 2 years ago even today, apparently even that is a blip in many embedded hardware solutions' life-cycle. Some manufacturing sectors are still selling m68k and Z80 CPUs. For SoCs though, it seems the tradition is: fork a particular Linux kernel release, mangle it beyond recognition, throw it over the wall and then act like customers are speaking an alien language if they ever ask for updates.
"Don't accept old kernels" is almost equivalent to telling many unrelated businesses in a particular ecosystem to burn their investments and start again from scratch, just because the SoC and/or board vendors have a broken business model. And that's hard to explain to business people and even hardware engineers that a chip/board/subsystem is "unsupported" even though supply guarantees stretch out to the year 2020 and beyond.
And for all I know, perhaps these businesses deserve everything that happens to them, who knows.
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