Re: Decision about oot-modules for etch
On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 05:52:34PM +0200, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> Daniel Baumann wrote:
> > Can you make an announcement to all oot-module maintainers, telling them
> > that they should put their packages together into linux-modules-extra
> > (for main) or a similar one for contrib, and if they're not doing it,
> > they will end up in an unsupported (no updates for point-releases, no
> > updates for kernel ABI bump updates) package.
> What does no answer mean?
> 'We need more time to think about it', 'Yes, we will do that', 'No, we
> will not do that', or 'Get lost, we don't care about that'?
I think I've already indicated that I don't agree we should be forbidding
separate kernel module packages in stable releases, so it follows
automatically that I don't think we should be *telling* maintainers of such
packages that it would be forbidden. Or "unsupported", I guess -- but I
equate "unsupported" with "not released", because I do expect Debian as an
organization to support any packages that are included in a stable release
and to therefore raise objections prior to release about any packages that
are not supportable. However, these objections generally come from the
package maintainers; so far the objections in this case seem to originate
with the kernel team, and it's not their call to decide whether such
packages will or won't be supported when they haven't been asked to support
them individually -- only inasmuch as the kernel packages are expected to
not randomly break buildability of kernel modules in general.
Perhaps I have overlooked some objections from our SRMs as well. That would
certainly be a factor, and I would defer to them on the question of whether
Debian can support such packages. But I also don't think that changing
kernel ABIs in a stable kernel release is something that should be taken
lightly, regardless of whether it can be easily managed wrt other Debian
packages, because other users may be building their *own* module packages
where such ABI changes come with a significant cost. Sometimes this is
unavoidable (i.e., ABI-changing security fixes), but I don't think that's a
reason to change ABIs more often than we absolutely need to.
Anyway, as far as announcing anything to "oot-module maintainers" is
concerned, I don't have any idea who those are -- last I checked, there was
only one source package in unstable building kernel-modules packages.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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