Bug#623441: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: should (indirectly) depend on kernel 2.6.38
Cyril, thank you for your quick reply.
Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org> writes:
>> The package xserver-xorg-video-nouveau was upgraded, but as it does
>> not depend on a linux 2.6.38, the installed kernel was still version
>> 2.6.32. Subsequently, the xserver failed to start (logfile included
>> below).
>
> Then you didn't upgrade to the most recent state of Debian testing
> since we made sure it had 2.6.38 before letting that version of
> nouveau in.
I executed "aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade". Kernel 2.6.38
was available in the repositories but did not get installed
automatically, as I had installed linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64 directly
instead of linux-image-2.6-amd64 (which depends on the latest 2.6
kernel).
>> I suggest to make xserver-xorg-video-nouveau depend (indirectly) on
>> kernel 2.6.38 to resolve this issue.
>
> AFAICT, that's not possible, and even if it was, it wouldn't guarantee
> you're running the needed kernel; and how do you support home-built
> kernels?
I see now that /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau/README.Debian
mentions that at least kernel 2.6.34 is required for this package to
work. I was not aware that there is no way to state such a dependency
in a way which is understood by dpkg.
That's a pity, because after executing the familiar "update &
full-upgrade", I suddenly ended up without a working X. This might be a
serious problem for users who are not comfortable to work from the
command line.
As this seems to be a rather rare case where a package is tightly bound
to a specific kernel version, perhaps a good solution would be a
postinst script which checks whether a compatible nouveau module is
installed and warn if not?
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