The Debian Xen packaging has been carrying a long pile of invasive patches to use this modified filesystem layout for quite some time now. I assume the goal is to make it possible to install multiple versions of Xen at the same time. But that doesn’t seem to have been successful in practice (e.g. #536173, #536176).
These patches make the Xen package extraordinarily difficult to modify or upgrade (I’ve tried!). Every added component requires another set of patches, and every new upstream version requires rewriting many of the existing patches. I can only assume that this difficulty at least partially to blame for the gap of more than a year between these last two Xen releases in Debian (#526833). Furthermore, users who read the upstream Xen documentation (#508139), as well as programs that try to use the Xen binaries (#481105) or libraries (#507186), get thrown off by the alternate layout. Is there actually a use case for installing multiple versions of Xen on the same system? Perhaps it is time to reconsider them and use a layout closer to upstream’s? Or if not, perhaps the patches can be sent upstream and integrated as a supported configure option, so that Debian does not need to maintain an unsupported layout separately? Anders -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
