Re: Legitimate exercise of our constitutional decision-making processes [Was, Re: Tentative summary of the amendments]
Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
>> There are a ton, but because Debian architectures encode choice of
>> kernel, they're represented in the archive as packages that are not
>> available for kFreeBSD or Hurd, or only available for kFreeBSD, or only
>> available for Hurd.
> That said, dependencies on specific kernel versions or features have no
> representation at all in Debian package metadata, which proves rather
> painful to deal with in packages that need specific kernel features
> enabled in order to function.
True, and *that* is for the same reason why representing the running init
system in package metadata is hard. It's not normally useful to depend on
a particular version of the Linux kernel, since all that does is ensure
that the kernel is installed, not that the system is currently booted
under it (which is the part that actually matters for nearly all
software).
I can't think of a good way to do this that doesn't make the situation
even more confusing for the user, but if someone else can, that would be a
useful thing to have fixed in several different ways. Which I guess is
Wanderer's point, so maybe I've come around to agreeing with that part of
it. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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