Marco d'Itri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The problem with supporting old kernels is not just the need to maintain
2.4 is not old, it's just stable :) > a few packages like initrd-tools or modutils, but that every important > package cannot rely on features of modern kernels: inotify, sysfs, etc. Well, I live quite well with Debian unstable on top of 2.4 on my workstation. It seems there are not so much important packages that really rely on "modern" features. > This means that Debian as a whole will either lack support for features > relying on these kernel features or will become more and more complex > due to compatibility code. Well, if there are really packages that demand on 2.6, they just can depend on kernel-image-2.6, this is no problem at all. I agree with you that package maintainers should not be forced to develop 2.4-compatibility on their own, if upstream doesn't do it itself. However, from my point of view, quite all relevant software just *does* support 2.4 and 2.6 upstream anyways. So there is virtually no need to increase complexity. > Please consider carefully the effects of advocating support for old > kernels. IIRC, Linus declared feature-freeze for 2.6.16 first. To be honest, I cannot see any feature-freeze until now. I personally decided to give 2.6 a first try on my workstation when 2.6.18 is out. However, as long as I can easily freeze my machine just by doing really simple disk-I/O tasks (which just happened when I had a need to boot into a Knoppix), I will definitely not consider it to run on my servers. regards Mario -- File names are infinite in length where infinity is set to 255 characters. -- Peter Collinson, "The Unix File System" -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]