Hi release team and initrd-tools maintainer, One issue that seems problematic for people currently upgrading from Sarge to Etch is that there is currently no initrd-tools package in Etch. (I guess it's been removed because of #395181 and/or #393092. Why can't #395181 just be fixed already?) The problem is that on a dist-upgrade, the new libc6 in Etch Conflicts against initrd-tools (<< 0.1.84.1). (This conflict was added in libc6 2.3.6-8.) Since there is no new initrd-tools in Etch to which we can upgrade, apt/aptitude is forced to decide to remove initrd-tools 0.1.81.1 to perform the upgrade. But all the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels in Sarge (at least on i386) Depend upon initrd-tools. So in order to dist-upgrade, one would be forced first to install a new kernel from Etch, in order not to have the package containing the running kernel removed out from under the system. However, if we look at the dependencies of the 2.6.18 kernel images in Etch, we see that they Depend: initramfs-tools | yaird | linux-initramfs-tool. The first of these Depends on udev (>= 0.086-1) which in turn Depends on the libc6 in Etch. The second directly Depends on the Etch libc6. The last is a virtual package that (at least in Etch/i386) is provided only by the first two. Hence there is currently *no way* to upgrade Sarge -> Etch without the package manager insisting to remove the running kernel package! Possible fixes: 1) Fix #395181 so initrd-tools can get back into Etch 2) Make available 2.4.27/2.6.8 kernel images for a new Sarge point release that don't depend on initrd-tools 3) Make available udev and/or yaird packages built against the Sarge libc6 4) Remove the initrd-tools conflict from libc6 in Etch (might not work due to #364338) 5) Others? regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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