Hi Manoj,
> The second argument, which is the location of the kernel image
> (which need not be in /boot, you know) is used by the scripts shipped
> with kernel-package to create features that would not be otherwise
> possible -- unless we also remove from kernel-package the ability to
> install the image in locations other than /boot.
Ah, that makes sense. I guess that the official kernels don't need this
parameter because they always install into /boot?
> One solution is to have the user deploy scripts into /etc/kernel
> that meets their needs, but this seems to be somewhat tedious for end
> users.
Yup, that's not really a long-term solution IMHO.
> A solution might be to create packages that just contain
> conffiles in /etc/kernel/, and who provide the virtual package
> kpkg-image-conf, and have all kernel-package image packages Recommend
> the virtual package. This way, the user will not be impacted by the
> inability of the initramfs-tools package's conffile to cater to the
> other flavours of kernel image packages.
This sounds rather like a lot of infrastructure for something simple. Also,
how would this work with official kernel images? Would this new configfile
apply the same second-argument test to only work with kernel-package generated
kernels? In that case, we will be stuck forever with two complementary scripts
(that essentially do the same) using some ugly hack based om parameter counts
to not conflict with each other.
Also, in this situation it would be impossible to remove the hack from either
script later on. It seems to make more sense to remove the hack from the
initramfs-tools script eventually, when the "new" version of kernel-package
has been around for a while. However, until then, we need some other way of
making things work, that will transition smoothly into a initramfs-tools
script that works for all kernels.
I propose the following: Let kernel-package expose a KERNEL_PACKAGE_VERSION
variable to /etc/kernel/postinst.d scripts. This allows the initramfs-tools
script to generate an initrd if
a) KERNEL_PACKAGE_VERSION >= 12.001
b) KERNEL_PACKAGE_VERSION is not set and there is only a single argument is
passed (e.g., for official kernels).
This will make initramfs-tools, kernel-package and official kernels play
together for both new and old versions. The only gap here is kernel-package
12.001 until the current version, which won't work out of the box (but we
won't be able to fix those anyway).
This approach also allows the initramfs-tools to remove the above checks
eventually, when older versions of kernel-package can be considered to be no
longer in use.
Also, letting kernel-package pass its version to scripts might have other
uses as well. It will allow scripts to change their behaviour based on
kernel-package version in an elegant way. Even if we were to add
kpkg-image-conf like packages later on, these could use the version number as
well (because just using Depends: to get the right version won't work, since
we might install kernel images built with different versions of
kernel-package).
Would this work?
Gr.
Matthijs
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