[Pkg-xen-devel] Debian revisions and policy comments [signed]

[Ralph Passgang]

Am Donnerstag, 16. Februar 2006 18:53 schrieb Jeremy T. Bouse [c]:
[...]
>     As for the kernel patch build policy. As I've spoken with a few
> other DDs, the build should be self-contained and this not require
> anything beyond what is listed in the Build-Depends in order to build
> properly. The idea being a blackbox build that only downloads what's
> listed in the Build-Depends and builds offline. With that the use of the
> upstream build process using wget to download the kernel doesn't fit
> well. 

an alternative is to create source package that already have the 
"linux-<version>.tar.bz2" file included. That would blow the package but 
would make it possible to build the binary packages without any inet access. 

> Unfortunately Debian only provides one kernel source package and 
> it isn't exactly the same version in stable, testing and unstable so
> this is a bit of a quandry to work out as we need to provide a patch. 

and adam seems to dislike using the debian kernel-source packages also, but as 
I mentioned after that comment he never uploaded a newer version anymore.

the problem is not just that there are different versions in stable, testing 
and unstable, but also that a kernel-source version will disappear from 
testing and unstable and that would force us to find another solution then.

> as 
> someone stated this would be a lot easier if it were merged with the
> mainstream kernel, but that may take some time so we need to come up
> with the most elegant way that fits the distribution. I hadn't taken
> much of a look yet to see what the patches actually did but noticed that
> the patches were applied before the sparse tree during the patch
> creation process. Would it potentially be possible for us to manage
> multiple kernel version patches to be applied before the sparse tree in
> order to match the versions available within the distribution?

hmmm, I don't know If I got you right, but supporting another kernel version 
then the xen upstream normally uses is afaik a hard job.

> Granted 
> this would add extra effort into making the build. Obviously having
> upstream just providing kernel-<version>.patch files would be better
> than having to generate the patch during build process, but that may
> take even more time to coordinate.

I don't know if upstream wants that, but on the other hand they haven't fixed 
a problem that exists in the upstream mehtod to create the kernel patch for 
some time now, that's why the patch gets created with the following command 
in debian/rules:

diff -Nurp pristine-linux-$(LINUX_VERSIONS)/ linux-$(LINUX_VERSIONS)-xen/ 
>linux-$(LINUX_VERSIONS)-xen.patch

normaly even that should be done with xen's makefile target: mkpatches.

>
>     Regards,
>     Jeremy