[Fedora-packaging] Re: Mail voting on kmdl adoption

Jack Neely jjneely at ncsu.edu
Mon Aug 14 19:49:50 UTC 2006


On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 05:33:10PM +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 04:06:36PM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > You forgot the biggest "issue" (note the quotes): All the depsolvers 
> > would need special handling to install kmods for newly installed 
> > kernels. That works out of the box with the current scheme and IMHO is 
> > an important advantage of the current standard. Yes, there exists a 
> > yum-plugin already that handles it. But we would need something for 
> > up2date/RHEL5 too in case the ABI breaks -- I suspect that's to late.
> 
> o the yum-plugin for kmods is broken and possibly cannot be rectified,
>   see mail to Jack

Ah, breakage.  Tisk, tisk.  Solve this one:

Installed are:
kernel-2.6.17-1.2157_FC5
kmod-foo-2.6.17-1.2157_FC5-1.2
foo-1.2-1_FC5

where kmod-foo-1.2.2.6.17-1.2157_FC5 requires foo = 1.2

Yum has:
kernel-2.6.17-1.2171_FC5
kmod-foo-2.6.17-1.2171_FC5-1.3
foo-1.3_FC5

And kmod-foo-2.6.17-1.2171_FC5-1.2 requires foo = 1.3.

So what happens here?

# yum update

We reboot into our new kernel and 10 minutes later we see that foo is
totally broken because there's not a kernel module for it.

# yum install kmod-foo-2.6.17-1.2171_FC5

Yum pulls in foo-1.3 to meet the requirements.  Now we experiance pain
as foo-1.2 and foo-1.3 are userland packages and cannot be co-installed.

This affects both schemes.  Is this a technical problem that can be
fixed?

> 
> o "out of the box" the current scheme is severely broken. In yum you get
>   file conflicts, in rpm total breakage and in smart/apt you get your
>   running kernel modules nuked.
> 

I did this with Yup (of all horrid, gross, gangly things) 6 years ago
with a bit of documentation/policy.

> You make it sound like the kmdl scheme needs special handling, while
> it's the other way round. The kmdl scheme does never jeopardize your
> existing install and this inherits to all depsolvers and rpm. While
> the kmod scheme violates basic rpm ordering rules and tried to rectify
> with in-depsolver special handling *and* plugins and has already been
> shown to be broken by design.
> -- 
> Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

The kmdl scheme *does* require depsolver modifications to work.  I must be
able to push out updated kernel modules to my clients in an automated
fashion.  

Jack

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-- 
Jack Neely <jjneely at ncsu.edu>
Campus Linux Services Project Lead
Information Technology Division, NC State University
GPG Fingerprint: 1917 5AC1 E828 9337 7AA4  EA6B 213B 765F 3B6A 5B89




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