deltarpms and newer kernels

[M A Young]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010, Marko Vojinovic wrote:

> On Saturday 23 January 2010 21:55:21 Antonio Olivares wrote:
>> Deltarpms does help a little bit with many packages, but the kernel is not
>>  one of them :(
>>
>> kernel-devel, kernel-headers, kernel-firmware, etc do work though, how come
>>  kernel package is not the same?
>
> Not sure if I understand it correctly, but anyway... The kernel is not being
> updated, but rather installed concurrently with other kernels. So you cannot
> create a delta rpm for it, since there is a completely new rpm coming with
> each kernel. If kernel was supposed to be *updated* then maybe you could
> create a delta, but if you want to *install* it (from scratch, as is done in
> Fedora), then delta will not help.

Actually, it should be possible to use deltarpm to create a new kernel RPM 
from the previous kernel if it is installed, and indeed it worked in 
previous Fedora versions.
I think the issue is the initramfs file in /boot that is fooling deltarpm 
into thinking that the kernel files have been modified so deltarpm 
wouldn't work. Kernels from earlier Fedora versions used initrd files, 
which are generated as part of the install, and I imagine that deltarpm 
knew it could ignore them (perhaps as a result of the packaging in the 
kernel RPM.

 	Michael Young