Kernel dependency issues

[Christopher Beland]

On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 10:43 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:08:46 -0500, Christopher wrote:
> 
> > After a "yum update --skip-broken", I now have the following
> > kernel-related packages installed:
> > 
> > kernel-debug-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> > kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> > kernel-debuginfo-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> > kernel-debuginfo-common-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> > kernel-firmware-2.6.28-0.121.rc7.git5.fc11.noarch
> > kernel-headers-2.6.28-0.121.rc7.git5.fc11.x86_64
> 
> How did you create this list? The main kernel packages are missing!

rpm -qa | grep kernel | sort

I don't have regular "kernel" installed because "kernel-debug" is just
the kernel with debugging features enabled, and I have been
experiencing oopses.

> > kernel-debug-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> > kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> 
> These two packages have disappeared in the newer build:
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=73968
> (old: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=70131 )
> 
> Could be that these sub-packages are obsolete but have not been
obsoleted
> anywhere. It's a common mistake package maintainers do, especially
since
> there is no Fedora policy on strict "Obsoletes". That leads to broken
> dependencies during updates.

OK, I filed this issue as bug 476236.

> > kernel-debuginfo-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> > kernel-debuginfo-common-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64
> > kernel-firmware-2.6.28-0.121.rc7.git5.fc11.noarch
> > kernel-headers-2.6.28-0.121.rc7.git5.fc11.x86_64
> > 
> > 1.) Note that kernel-firmware and kernel-headers are out of sync
with
> > the other packages.  Should this be allowed by the dependency
checker?
> 
> Yes, I think so. If the dependencies are lax, a broad range of
> package release is sufficient. The kernel requires a pretty strict
> version of kernel-firmware, and glibc-headers only requires sufficient
> kernel-headers to be installed.

Filed as bug 476238.

> > 2.) From their descriptions, it looks like kernel-headers and
> > glibc-headers are only needed if you are compiling code.  Are they
safe
> > to remove if I know I don't do that sort of thing?  If so, shouldn't
> > they have "-devel" in the name?  I remove all -devel packages to
keep my
> > system clean.
> 
> Decide yourself based on the package description.
> 
> I'm surprised one can "rpm -e glibc-headers" while keeping glibc-devel
> That looks a bit strange.

I'll leave you to file a bug on that if you think it's wrong.  I think
I'll remove kernel-headers just to keep things tidy.  Thanks for the
sanity check!

-B.