Bug#731995: gdm3 needs linux >= 3.2

[Simon McVittie]

On 16/12/13 16:44, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote:
> It is difficult to depend on specific linux versions, as every package
> has the architecture and linux version in the name.

Depending on specific Linux versions is Not Done: partly because Debian
does not require use of the kernel metapackages and considers
self-compiled kernels to be a suitable alternative to official Debian
kernels (as long as they are of a suitable version and have enough
CONFIG_* options enabled, which is the sysadmin's responsibility to
ensure), and partly because depending on a package containing a
particular kernel is not enough to guarantee that that kernel is the one
that's actually *running*.

Because of its interactions with hotplug and device events, udev is "the
usual suspect" for needing to be upgraded in lockstep with the kernel.
In Debian 7 it uses:

Breaks: linux-image-2.6-amd64 (< 2.6.32),
        linux-image-2.6-openvz-amd64 (< 2.6.32),
        ...

(and the equivalents on non-amd64) as a way to declare that it can't
work with kernels older than the one in Debian 6. If gdm3 adds package
relationships for this bug, they should probably take the same form.

> But as it affects the upgrade path from oldstable, this probably should
> be done somehow.

As far as I'm aware, Debian does not support upgrades from version n to
version n+2: when jessie becomes stable (as Debian 8), if you have a
machine that still runs squeeze (Debian 6), you're expected to complete
the upgrade to wheezy (Debian 7), and in particular reboot into a wheezy
kernel, before you start upgrading to jessie. The same applies while
jessie is still testing: to go from oldstable to testing, upgrade to
stable first.

If extra dependencies that make unsupported upgrades work better are
easy to do and don't break anything else, they're worth considering, but
their absence isn't necessarily a bug.

    S