[Fedora-packaging] questions regarding kernel-devel and kernel-smp-devel packages

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Mon Mar 28 18:36:14 UTC 2005


On Mar 27, 2005, Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com> wrote:

> We need the ability to install any or multiple kernel-*devel packages
> in order to build modules against any target kernel version and
> arch. Upgrade is never desired with kernel-*devel.

I disagree.  Having to clean up for up2date/yum/whatever because
multiple kernels pile up as updates are released is already bad
enough, but it's desirable because, if you removed the old kernel and
the new one happened to break on your box, you're toast.

I can't think of any such strong rationale for kernel*-devel.  Sure,
it may be convenient for a small fraction of the developer base, which
is significantly smaller than the user base.  IMHO kernel*-devel
should upgrade just like any other package.  The few people who would
rather keep multiple kernel-devel packages are probably skilled enough
to make the small configuration change needed to achieve their goal.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}




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