Re: Bug#331391: Re: ftpmaster: Please remove 2.6.8 kernel images

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 01:32:56PM +0900, Horms wrote:
> > Nope, the latest are now provided by the linux-2.6 package as a legacy
> > compatibility thingy and depend on the linux-image 2.6.12 kernels. I think
> > from now on, and with the exception of the mips kernels, all 2.6 kernel
> > related source packages which are not linux-2.6 should go.
> 
> Sven, I don't think this is the case. Examining
> kernel-headers-2.6-686-smp in sid I find that it is a package
> produced by the kernel-latest-2.6-i386 source package. I do not
> see it provided as a virtual or real package by linux-2.6.
> If I understand Jeroen correctly, this needs to be resolved.
> 
> In a nutshell it seems that kernel-image-2.6-<flavour> is
> handled by linux-2.6 but kernel-headers-2.6-<flavour>
> 
> This problem does not seem to exist on powerpc because the header
> packages, (called kernel-build-*) were never released as generic
> 2.6-<flavour> dummy packages. However, adding
> kernel-headers-2.6-<flavour> as part of the transition would do no harm.

Well, i wonder if this is a bad thing or not, or if we should kill the
meta-backward-compatible-header packages. We have to see the use case oif
those, which are exclusively used to build modules, and we need to setup a new
way of building modules and document it anyway, so this should not be a major
problem. 

Also, if the user don't upgrade those, nothing major will break, apart from
the fact that he has a few unused bits on his harddisk.

So, i vote for simply removing them, and provide some notice of the fact and
the new module build model in the release notes or something.

> With this in mind we can divide all architectures into two camps.
> 
> 1. Provide dummy headers packages, which need to be provided by
>    linux-2.6 for now:
>      alpha, amd64, hppa, i386, s390, sparc
> 
> 2. Do not provide dummy header packages, but adding them to linux-2.6
>    would not do much harm (not adding them would't do any harm either):
>      arm, ia64, m68k, mips[*], mipsel[*], powerpc, sh[*]
> 
>    [*] mips, mipsel and sh are not currently built from the 
>        unified linux-2.6 package
> 
> So while we would like to get everything 2.6 that didn't come
> from linux-2.6, and isn't for mips (or sh?) out of the archive,
> it seems we need to add a little more package magic first.

Maybe, but see above.

Friendly;

Sven Luther