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pushing 2.6.16 into testing and the powerpc situation ...



Package: linux-2.6
Severity: grave

Hi, ...

It seems 2.6.16 is going to be pushed into testing soon, and i have some
reservations about this fact.

Half the subarches will not be working in testing in this case anymore, and so
i have a feeling that doing this just like that is not a good idea. We have
almost a year ago decided to stop allowing multiple kernel version in the
archive simultaneously, and i feel now that it was a good thing, but once you
push the 2.6.16 kernel into testing with known-not-to-work subarches, a given
subset of the powerpc machines now become uninstallable, and an upgrade will
break existing installs silently. Furthermore, not all is already known about
the arch=ppc to arch=powerpc migration, so it is good to keep 2.6.15 around
for some time.

So given this, i would vote against pushing 2.6.16 into testing at this time.

On another hand, i understand that those subarches are relatively minor, and
should not stop progress.

So, basically, i think a prerequisite to get 2.6.16 into testing is creating a
backup of the 2.6.15 packages, a warning of this problem (maybe with a debconf
preinst which would be called if a known broken subarch is detected); and some
documentation for users to use for fallback.

I could copy these packages into people.debian.org/~luther/kernel, but this
one will probably go away once i am forced out of debian, so i would like a
more stable place for having those, somewhere on kernel.debian.net ? 

This framework will also be usefull for future cases of subarch breakage, and
it will be more convenient if we kept older kernel versions in such an archive
over the archive.debian.net case.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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