Bug#404749: closed by Filipus Klutiero <philippe.cloutier.2@ulaval.ca> (Invalid)
This report is invalid. As you state yourself, "Actually, you can
compile them but you can't load them because of the kernel
version difference."
That does not invalidate the report. The two packages do not work
together properly, though there may be people who need to use them
together. gcc should still probably be
flagged as incompatible with that kernel, though maybe dpkg/apt needs a
soft conflict tag - report a warning but don't prevent the install.
The issue could probably still be addressed to some degree with
the "Recommends:" tag.
Soft-conflict: linux-image-2.6.16-1-686, "Loadable Kernel Modules must be
compiled with same gcc version as kernel"
I strongly suggest you to reinstall a Debian release which is
appropriate for your level of Debian knowledge, that is stable or testing.
Don't be an ass. I have over a decade of linux experience (and SunOS,
Solaris, Ultrix, AIX, etc. before that) and am the co-author of a linux
programming book. Most of my experience is with (or even predates) RPM
based systems but I do have several debian boxes. If the incompatibility
was not obvious to me, it is a debian packaging defect not a personal one.
But if it causes problems for me, it will cause even greater problems for
less experienced people so I generously used my valuable time to report
the bug so other people wouldn't have the same problem. I was able to
install gcc-4.0 to fix the immediate problem and will probably do a kernel
upgrade to 2.6.18-3 in the future.
And I don't see how "testing" would be an appropriate recommendation for
someone you think is inexperienced. And the recommendation to
switch distributions in either direction because of your flawed perception
is non-sense.
In fact, the reason I upgraded to unstable in the first place is that
stable is essentially unusable these days. It is just too damn old, what
with debian developers wasting time over license fanaticism instead of
making a working distribution when a new "stable" was already long
overdue. I already had to upgrade much of the system to
"unstable" and APT was having hissy fits of wanting to upgrade huge
numbers of packages, remove large numbers of packages, or even "you can't
get there from here" when I tried to install various packages. KDE,
gnome, new kernels, x.org, udev, just too much in need of
replacement. "stable" has essentially become unmaintainable on desktop systems
(might be ok on some servers with no peripherals and no GUI programs).
I never would have installed stable in the first place if unstable
snapshots were availible on DVD.
An example of a more appropriate response would have been:
"Yes, that is a problem but one which the current packaging
system fails to provide tools to address. Some developers
need to be able to install multiple versions of gcc to compile
programs for other systems and if I put in a "Conflicts:" tag,
it would interfere with that and using "--force" might be
dangerous (more so in apt-get than dpkg). I am, therefore, filing a
bug report on dpkg suggesting that a new tag be added to debian
package files for soft conflicts"
But "Recommends: " might have helped, though I don't know if dist-upgrade
would have printed a message based on that.
Oh, I did file the bug on dpkg so there is no longer any need for you to
do so. That was roughly the 43rd bug report I filed today.
(some were on upstream packages).
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