Attention kernel module project packagers!

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at laiskiainen.org
Thu Aug 17 19:10:04 UTC 2006


On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 11:29 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 12:32 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > > It's the same story: Parallel installation.
> > 
> > Indeed - and to be exact: safely upgradable parallel installation.
> > 
> > We have for example libpng-1.2.8 and libpng10-1.0.18 in FC5. Rpm would 
> > allow installing them parallerly if they were just libpng-1.2.8 and 
> > libpng-1.0.18 so why do we rename it? To allow them to be upgraded 
> > separately, an alleged 'rpm -Uvh libpng-1.2.9' would remove both versions.
> > 
> > I haven't seen anybody arguing we should drop those compat packages and 
> > rely on yum plugin to deal with situations like the above correctly... so 
> > why are kernel modules any different?
> 
> So, why is the kernel any different? 

Well, not everybody treats them differently. Mandake and now Mandriva
packages their kernels this way:

$ rpm --nosignature -qp --qf "Name: %{name}\nVersion: %{version}\nRelease: %{release}\n" kernel-2.6.12.12mdk-1-1mdk.i586.rpm
Name: kernel-2.6.12.12mdk
Version: 1
Release: 1mdk

I think I've also seen names like kernel24, kernel26 in some distro(s).

>  Let's identify the differences
> between the kernel and other packages and then decide whether
> kernel-modules fit the same criteria as the kernel or normal packages.

One major difference is the fact that installing / upgrading a kernel
doesn't make it's features available runtime by the install/upgrade
finishes. It makes things like "if the user asks for nvidia kernel
driver installation, for which kernel(s) the driver should be installed
for?" less than obvious. Not that this particular difference has much to
do with versioning in name or not.

	- Panu -




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