[Pkg-xen-devel] Does it still make sense to have versioned xen-hypervisor, libxen and xen-utils?

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2015-02-18 at 14:53 +0100, Stefan Bader wrote:
> So given that for above reasons moving between xen versions installed in
> parallel is not as straight forward as one would hope and maintaining the
> patches to get the versioned packages is some effort, what are/were the reasons
> to do this? Might be a dumb question but I guess I have to ask anyway.

Apart from parallel installation (which is useful in itself) it also
eases regular upgrades, since you can install all the new packages,
reboot (e.g. where xendomains will still want to use the old tools) and
then pick up the new tools. Plus it makes it easier to roll back in case
of problems.

At some point I'd really love to see the ability to install into
versioned directories become a properly integrated feature of the
upstream build system which Debian could simply enable. That would take
a bunch of reworking (since the patches take a slightly too big hammer
approach) and I'm not sure when, if ever, I might get to it...

Ian.