Bug#336721: Confusion regarding ramdisk Provides; is initrd-tools still supported?

[Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org>]

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Martin Michlmayr wrote:

> Package: initrd-tools
>
> linux-2.6 no longer allows initrd-tools for the generation of the
> initrd.  It's not clear however whether this is intentional or just a
> typo.  The following changelog claims that all initrd/initramfs
> generating tools are supported, so I assume this would include
> initrd-tools:
>
> | linux-2.6 (2.6.13+2.6.14-rc4-0experimental.1) experimental; urgency=low
>
> |  * Fixed control.image.in to depend on :
> |      initramfs-tools | yaird | linux-ramdisk-tool
> |    where linux-ramdisk-tools is the virtual package provided by all
> |    initrd/initramfs generating tools.
>
> initramfs-tools and yaird provide 'linux-initramfs-tool' while
> initrd-tools provides 'linux-initrd-tool'.  I see that the current
> linux-2.6 depends on linux-initramfs-tool, but that is not fulfiled by
> initrd-tools.
>
> Is this a typo in the Provides of initrd-tools or will initrd-tools
> not work with 2.6.14 kernels?

As far as I can tell, this is correct. Initrds for current kernels *must* 
be generated using either yaird or initramfs-tools (both of which are 
experimental software, by the way), since devfs support was dropped in 
2.6.13 and initrd-tools rely heavily on it. We still need initrd-tools for 
situations when we have, let's say, 2.6.8 and 2.6.14 installed at the same 
time.

Best regards,

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