On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 12:28:22PM +0100, Julien BLACHE wrote:
> Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> wrote:
[...]
> > worked around by using DKMS or similar with prebuilt binaries and
> > requiring exact kernel version dependencies?
>
> DKMS is useless if the ABI number doesn't change, in its current
> form. If DKMS was changed to rebuild all modules when the kernel package
> is upgraded, we'd still have issues with on-disk modules not matching
> the running kernel ABI until the machine is rebooted. This can sometimes
> take two or three weeks if a long-running computation is running on the
> machine.
>
> We switched to DKMS to reduce the maintenance cost associated with
> prebuilt binaries. We'd rather not come back to that if we can help
> it. It also adds a delay to kernel updates that we'd rather avoid.
>
> As to using strict dependencies... it makes all of the above even
> worse.
>
> And I'll ask again: what's the point of the kernel ABI number if we have
> to use strict dependencies? Seriously?
[...]
Do pay attention. We were discussing the implications of changing our
current practice of trying to avoid ABI bumps during freeze and stable
updates. We would then probably change the uname release (the ABI
identifier) in each version of the package.
Ben.
--
Ben Hutchings
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
- Albert Camus