On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 09:04:05AM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote: > To make it more interesting, Matt Zimmerman revealed[2] that merging all > kernel source packages would save space of one CD from our archive and our > CD images.
I was probably exaggerating slightly; I did not do the calculations. However, each kernel-source package represents 25M of binary and 30M of source packages, which is a significant amount of space both in the main archive and on the CD set, not to mention the benefits in simplicity and maintainability. > Since sarge is far from being released, now would be a perfect time to > start working on consolidating kernel and source packages in order to have > a new and much better working system ready for sarge when it is time to > release. Another thing that concerns me is the upgrade process. The practice of overwriting the running kernel and modules results in a risky, interactive installation process, and makes it impossible to back out to the old kernel unless the user takes appropriate measures. I noticed that the current 2.4.20 kernel-image packages in unstable have taken a different approach. When the i386 kernel was updated to include the ptrace fix, it was built as a separate binary package, 2.4.20-1-<subarch> rather than 2.4.20-<subarch>. This allowed both kernels to be installed simultaneously, and the upgrade easily reverted. Users who had installed the kernel-image-2.4-686 metapackage were still automatically upgraded. -- - mdz
