Re: Uploading linux (4.9.2-1)

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 06:23:27PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Tue, 2017-01-10 at 18:05 +0000, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 05:04:50PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > > I intend to upload linux version 4.9.2-1 to unstable tomorrow
> > > (Wednesday).  As this is a new upstream version, there is of course an
> > > ABI bump.
> > 
> > Hi.
> > 
> > (Sorry if this is already reported, last time I looked at the bug page it was not)
> > 
> > Is there any chance to remove the leading .0 from the binary package names?
> > 
> > I know it's mostly harmless, but it's misleading anyway to have linux-image-4.8.0-2-amd64
> > to really contain 4.8.11 and not 4.8.0, and if it's done for compatibility reasons,
> > we have done it for a lot of time already for tools to adapt.
> 
> The package names need to match kernel release strings:
> 
> - reportbug maps 'kernel' to linux-image-$(uname -r) and this must be
>   a real, not virtual package
> - module-assistant can auto-install linux-headers-$(uname -r) when
>   building for the current kernel release
>
> And kernel release strings with only 2 dotted components may break
> software in subtle or severe ways that are hard to diagnose.  The
> previous time we tried this, we got #742226 and #745984.

So, could you make, for example, uname -r to be "4.9.x-1-amd64"
(and by "x" I mean a real "x", not a figure).

I guess that if you override the kernel version so that it's 4.8.0
even if it's really 4.8.11 and nothing bad happens, you could also use
an arbitrary string after the second dot.

If we really have to use two dots, linux-image-4.8.x-2-amd64 would be
a better name than linux-image-4.8.0-2-amd64 for the binary package.

> If we change this again it will be at the start of a release cycle, not
> the end.

Ok, I understand this (I also have had bugs like that for which the
cure was worse than the disease).

Thanks.