Re: Approaching VMware (and others) to get Debian listed as supported ?
On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 01:57:48PM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 11:06:47AM -0500, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:
>
> > This may have used to be the case, but should not be a problem anymore, we
> > have only one kernel per released architecture, and make it easy enough for
> > them to build modules for the official kernels, the debian kernel team needs
> > to provide a document on how to build modules probably, but even if it is not
> > yet fully documented, everything is there to make it happen.
>
> They seem to be comparing Debian unstable, with other distros' official
> releases, which is a bit strange -- presumably they're not claiming to
> support beta versions of those other distros.
Well, probably because of the debian/woody being too old for them to care
about, the sarge release made this much nicer though.
But even following unsatble/testing kernels should be much much easier these
days.
> Anyway, I seem to remember that they provide the source for the bits that
> need to go into the guest operating system (I could be wrong, it's been a
> while since I last played with it). Given that, assuming we can have
> permission to redistribute binaries, and someone is willing to package
> them, the bits required to make everything work in the guest could be
> packaged and distributed (probably in non-free, but distributed
> nonetheless) by Debian, making it trivially easy for people to install
> under VMWare.
Indeed, in non-free if nothing else, but do we have the right to do so, and do
we have people interested in it ?
> A vmware-guest package could even depend on particular kernel versions if
> they're that stressed about it (savy admins could always get round that, at
> their own risk). Alternatively, the postinst could check the environment
> it's sitting in and put up a warning about it being unsupported, and how to
> fix that. Either of these would provide more assurance to them than they
> currently get from an RHEL system with a locally patched kernel.
Yep, there is really nothing outworlddly about it at all, maybe we simply need
someone to guide them to the right path, and/or they need to find the will to
have someone do it.
> Perhaps this should be pointed out to them, since if that were to happen,
> we'd be doing their testing for them during the Debian release cycle, and
> they would just need to confirm the facts at release time.
:)
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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