Re: removing 2.4 from etch/sid

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

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 12:26:40AM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 May 2006 20:53, Sven Luther wrote:
> > We have metapackages in place, which i believe will take charge of
> > upgrading from the 2.4 to the chosen etch 2.6 kernel. This, as any
> > kernel upgrade, will need a reboot, which is not without risk, but
> > which we should hopefully have ironed out all the major problems by the
> > time of the etch release, so it should be made to be painless (or
> > documented in the release notes).
> 
> Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 is absolutely not trivial in a lot of cases. See 
> the Sarge release notes for some potential issues users may face.

Well, ok, so we already have a somehwat complete list of issues that the user
can face. Contrary to woody->sarge migration though, where 2.6 kernels where
not the default, we are facing another issue here, and we should take the time
to clearly investigate all those migration problems, and offer a more detailed
set of instructions, or even better, some automated way to do it.

Naturally, udev is a mess, even in the case of 2.6->2.6 upgrades, and we don't
need to handle the case of self built kernels, as the user will probably know
how to handle the upgrade and o it by hand.

We should do a massive upgrade testing from between the freeze and the
release, and provide the best possible way for this. The :

  You are therefore strongly advised not to upgrade to a 2.6 kernel as part of
  the upgrade from woody to sarge. Instead, you should first make sure your
  system works correctly with either the old kernel or with a 2.4 kernel from
  sarge and do the upgrade to a 2.6 kernel later as a separate project.

part of the release note, is not something we can consider now, so this makes
a seamless upgrade all the more important.

Friendly,

Sven Luther