Re: Choosing a Debian Variant

[Craig Dickson <crdic@yahoo.com>]

Rajesh Fowkar wrote:

> In case your new kernel does not work as u want or some bugs etc. than u
> can easily revert back to your old kernel. 

I can more easily revert back to my old kernel without a .deb, because
the old kernel is still there, ready to be used. Whenever I build a
kernel, I keep the old one around for a while -- usually until I build
yet another one. There's always at least two kernels in my /boot
directory.

I tried using kernel-package (or whatever it's called) a while back and
found it annoying. The documentation was rather vague about what many of
the options did. When I build a kernel with the package name
"kernel-image-2.4.4-date.deb" (where 'date' was whatever the date was
that I built it), the resulting kernel image file was simply called
"vmlinuz-2.4.4", not "vmlinuz-2.4.4-date" as I had wanted, which meant
that I couldn't have two different 2.4.4 images installed at once. I
suppose there must be an option to control the actual image filename,
rather than the package name, but the docs were very unclear about how
to do that.

Lastly, and most importantly, the resulting .deb did not modify
lilo.conf and re-run lilo at install time, which is, for me, the single
most dangerous and easy-to- forget thing about installing a new kernel.
Without automating that, kernel-package was, in my view, useless. Now,
granted, not everyone uses lilo. Some people like grub or other boot
managers. But for a kernel package to be really useful, it needs to do
the complete install, including whatever the boot manager needs done
(assuming, at least, that one of the more common boot managers is being
used -- the package's install script could be smart about that). Without
that, I might as well do the whole process by hand, as it just isn't
that complex and when I do it myself, I know exactly what's being done.

Craig