Re: Linux kernel and packages providing kernel-source

[Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org>]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Aurelien Jarno wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The Linux kernel source packages are all providing a virtual package
> called kernel-source, so that other packages such as kernel patches can
> depend on them. The freebsd kernel (kfreebsd5-source) was recently
> included in Debian (mainly for the GNU/kFreeBSd port) and also provides
> kernel-source.
>
> This seems to confuse the users (what I understand) as we received a bug
> telling that aptitude proposes to install kfreebsd5-source when installing
> a kernel-patch.
>
> That's why we've deciced to provide the freebsd-kernel-source virtual
> package instead of kernel-source.
>
> I think it would be nice that the Linux kernel-source packages follow this
> policy, and thus provide linux-kernel-source. I don't say all package
> should be reuploaded, but maybe in a first time, the newest uploads could
> provide both kernel-source and linux-kernel-source, and the kernel patches
> depends on kernel-source | linux-kernel-source. Then in a second time it
> would be possible to remove references to kernel-source.
>
> I would like to have your comments on that.
>
> Bye,
> Aurelien

Hi Aurelien,

The kernel team is currently planning a transition to a different naming 
and packaging scheme. Anticipating the inclusion of freebsd and hurd 
kernels into the distribution we have pretty much agreed that future 
kernel packages are going to be called linux-source, linux-headers, 
linux-image and so on. It would be nice if you could adopt the same naming 
scheme for freebsd packages (freebsd-source, freebsd-image, etc). It will 
then be consistent everywhere and will allow to avoid the namespace 
clashes.

Best regards,

Jurij Smakov                                        jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                   KeyID: C99E03CC