[Fedora-xen] Upgrade to development xen on F8?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 09:22:15AM +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> I'm a bit torn between asking here and asking on the Fedora test list.
> 
> I'd like to use the latest xen (that's what I'm testing), but I don't want to 
> upgrade to the entire development tree.

By latest Xen do you mean '3.2.0' ? 

After discussions with upstream Xen developers we decide that Fedora will
only ever support the version of Xen that ships at the same time as that
Fedora release. eg F8 supports 3.1.x, and F9 support 3.2.x.  Meanwhile
upstream Xen will provide backports of new Xen releases for people who 
wish to try on existing Fedora. eg Xen provides a 3.2.0 RPM for Fedora 8
which you can get from xen.org. We co-operated to ensure the RPMs follow
the same style so it ought to be reasonably painless.

WRT to rawhide, I'd strongly recommend against upgrading to that any time
soon. Its just going to be too unstable to usefully run Xen until we get
the new kernel sorted. The existing kernel-xen in rawhide is known to be
broken wrt to even basic things like X and the 'ip' command.

> I tried this, and was astonished at the number of packages to upgrade!
> [root at potoroo ~]# yum install --disablerepo=* --enable=development kernel-xen 
> kernel-xen-2.6-doc xen xen-hypervisor xen-libs xenwatch | wc -l
> Error: Missing Dependency: kdemultimedia3 >= 3.5.8 is needed by package 
> kdemultimedia-extras-nonfree
> 845
> [root at potoroo ~]# 
> 
> Those 845 lines represent upgrading pretty much all of KDE and all of Gnome.

Hmm, the 'xen' RPM still has a dep on 'python-virtinst' which still has
a dep on 'virt-viewer' which uses GNOME. At very least we need to break
the dep between xen and python-virtinst - its a historical thing to assist
in upgrades from the FC5 days when 'virt-install' was part of the 'xen'
RPM itself. Since FC5 and FC6 are long dead we can kill the dep.



Dan.
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