On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 02:59:30PM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Mon, Jan 01, 2007 at 10:32:21PM -0500, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: > > > > > I disagree. I think that while it is not the majority, a sizeable > > portion of the user base installs a home-rolled kernel. > > Could you stop that hand of yours from waving around quite so much? Unless > you can provide some reasonably respectable numbers to support your > position, you're arguing about dancing angels. > According to popcon [0], there are 23,144 installations of dpkg. Now, if you add up *all* of the installs for kernel-image and linux-image packages, you have 16,601. That means that if you are *very* optimistic and assume that each and every individual linux-image and kernel-image package represents a unique machine (which is likely not the case, as many people install multiple kernels), then about 71.7% of popcon participants have installed something that *might* satisfy a kernel-image or linux-image dependency. That means that at the most conservative possible estimation, 28.3% of the popcon participating Debian user population has some sort of kernel installed that the package management system knows nothing about. So, to summarize: * my hands are not waving * I am not angry about angels, dancing or any other variety > > Now, I find out about your package and install it. Every indication > > from aptitude is that everything installs OK. Now, I try and use your > > package and it *doesn't* work because I am not running the kernel it > > depends on. > > > > What would I do at that point? Personally, without any further > > documentation or information available, I'd file a bug. > > This would be why the init script would, when it determined that you were > running an incompatible kernel, would spit out a helpful error message. > Then what is the point of depending on a kernel at all? As I have already demonstrated, a sizable portion of the Debian user base does not have any kernel-image or linux-image installed, meaning that they must have acquired a kernel and installed it via some means which dpkg knows nothing about. That being the case, why not just document what the package needs in the way of kernel support and let the user handle it? Apparently a non-trivial percentage of Debian users can handle installing their own kernels outside of the package management system. Regards, -Roberto [0] http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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