kernel-devel: should yum install, not update?

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Sat Jan 22 23:22:19 UTC 2005


On Sun, 2005-01-23 at 00:40 +0200, Ville Skyttä wrote:

> There is a simple way to make this work, already applied by lots of 3rd
> party kernel stuff (modules, devel etc) package(r)s: put the uname of
> the kernel in question to the package's Name: field.
> 
> This would also work with the kernel-devel packages.  No special cases
> needed in any tools.  The uname-in-name scheme is not too pretty
> looking, and it's (very) mildly annoying whenever one has to type it
> manually (eg. to rpm -e one), but other than that, it Just Works(tm).

Actually, there's one more thing: with this scheme, depsolvers should be
taught to pull in updated modules along with the kernel when it's
updated.  So that scheme alone doesn't solve the problem entirely, it
kind of just moves it elsewhere.  apt from fedora.us/pre-extras has done
that module pull-in for ages now, which is probably why I forgot to
mention this earlier.

This stuff is more a critical problem with external module packages than
kernel-devel ones though.

Whichever way is chosen, depsolvers need to be updated one way or the
another.  Maybe it's closest to the POLA to continue on the same path as
with the kernel packages, ie. add to installonlypkgs and similar for all
of them.  Adding a new field for this to the actual rpm packages sounds
like "not going to happen" to me, and would probably be essentially the
same as what the uname-in-name scheme does.




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