Bug#288880: kernel-headers-2.4.27-1-686-smp: arch/i386/boot and content missing from kernel header tree

[Yvan Seth <debbugs@seth.id.au>]

Package: kernel-headers-2.4.27-1-686-smp
Version: 2.4.27-6
Severity: important

External module sources that use export-objs and the kernel build system
in order to generate module .ver files break when executing the 'dep'
target.  This is because the arch/i386/boot directory (and the Makefile
that should be therein) is not present in the kernel-headers tree.

I'm not entirely sure that the module is doing the right thing here
though so this may be a false bug.  From what I can see the module's
Makefile would need to replicate a lot of code from the kernel build
system Makefiles and do some dodgey guesswork in order to generate the
..ver files without using the kernel build system's 'dep' target so I
think the way the module Makefile works should be okay.  It might not
mean much but this Makefile works as expected when used on SuSE SLES8
with it's equivalent kernel-headers tree (provided by the kernel-source
package on SuSE).

I notice that for Debian 2.6 kernel headers packages that this location
does exist (as a symlink from the specific
kernel-headers-<ver>-<release>-<build> installed package trees to the
base kernel-headers-<ver>-<release> installed package tree).  I can't
test with the 2.6 tree though because the driver module we're building
does not support 2.6 yet.

The module's makefile executes the 'dep' target with:

-----
ifeq (,$(TOPDIR))
    ...
dep:
    make -C $(KERNEL_SOURCE) dep SUBDIRS=`pwd`
    ...
-----

And has export-objs defined which is used to generate .ver files with
the %.ver:%.c style rule in Rules.make.  It works fine with SuSE kernel
headers and with configured full kernel-source trees on Debian, RedHat
and SuSE - it just doesn't work with the Debian kernel-headers packages
for 2.4 kernels.

Thanks
-Yvan

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-1-686-smp
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)

Versions of packages kernel-headers-2.4.27-1-686-smp depends on:
ii  coreutils [fileutils]         5.2.1-2    The GNU core utilities
ii  fileutils                     5.2.1-2    The GNU file management utilities 
ii  kernel-headers-2.4.27-1       2.4.27-6   Header files related to Linux kern

-- no debconf information