Bug#398924: Conflict between Gnome, udev, hotplug and linux-2.4

[Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>]

Hi,

* Steve Langasek (vorlon@debian.org) [061117 03:06]:
> On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 06:26:22PM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> 
> > > The order is not yet decided, it is just the current way it is written
> > > down. If you (or anyone else) could give hints what the best upgrade
> > > order is (perhaps even different for different situations), please don't
> > > hesitate to tell us.
> > When upgrading a 2.4 system, kernel first. It's also the easiest component
> > part to rollback.
> 
> Kernel first before what?  Before anything else in userspace?

Upgrading the kernel means to upgrade udev and also glibc. This is
entirly possible.

We have one problematic case, though: Upgrades from 2.2 to 2.6 on an
arch without 2.4-kernels. Do we need udev-backports for them?

> I don't see any reason to worry about rollbacks at all, except in the
> specific case of "the new kernel isn't set up right yet, so I need to be
> able to reboot to the old kernel to finish the upgrade."  I don't see that
> installing a new kernel first helps much with that; whether you install it
> first or last, installing linux-image-2.6.18-3-$foo is going to pull in
> initramfs-tools -> udev and udev is going to kick out hotplug.  Whether this
> happens at the beginning or at the end doesn't seem relevant to the user
> experience, since in either case there's a window after hotplug has been
> removed and before the kernel has been configured where a power failure
> could leave the system in a state that isn't easy to recover from.

So, we should document this state, and make sure people know how to
escape from it.

Cases where this state includes no network access worry me more, because
lots of people depend on network for upgrades (both for login and for
getting packages).


Cheers,
Andi
-- 
  http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/