Bug#521515: linux-headers-2.6.29-1-amd64: please restore symlinks into -common

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:16:39AM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 08:19:32PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > Out of couriosity (and to try and fix the nvidia driver build system)...
> > Documented by who?  Debian or the linux kernel?
> 
> Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt in the Linux source.

OK, I will read that.

Of course now I have to figure out a way to fix nvidia's conftest.sh
script which tries a bunch of test builds to learn how a given kernel
version does things (like does a certain function take 4 or 5 arguments,
etc).  I suppose all stuff that could have been done with #ifdef's based
on the kernel version, but well they didn't.  I guess that means I
have to.

I must admit I am starting to wonder if it would be less effort to
volunteer to maintain the symlink code for the linux-headers package
than it will be to fix all the 3rd party module code that expects a
single directory for the headers.  So far this change seems like a small
reduction in work for the linux-headers package in exchange for a lot
of work for a lot of other people.  Not that these other packages perhaps
should have ever done it the way they do, but it has always worked,
at least if you build a kernel from source and point the 3rd party
modules at the source dir, it does what you want it to do.  The 2.6.29
linux-headers no longer do what you want them to do.  Now they only
work with kbuild and anything else that used to work is now broken.
Documented or not.  Just because it isn't documented doesn't mean it
doesn't work.

-- 
Len Sorensen