On 09/27/2009 05:48 AM, Dave Plater wrote:
On 09/26/2009 07:13 PM, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
On 09/26/2009 12:59 AM, Marcus Meissner wrote:
On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 09:03:32AM +0200, Dave Plater wrote:
I am of the understanding that kernel-desktop normally requires kernel-desktop-base but now it obsoletes it. Is this a new feature or a bug?
The -base subpackage is back in the main kernel package.
That's not the complete explanation. The real story is this: For SLE11, we wanted to have multiple kernel packages that fulfilled a few goals 1) stop wasting space on virtualized guests and 2) don't install unsupported modules by default.
1) was accomplished with the -base package. 2) was accomplished with the -extra package. The thing is that 2) makes *no* sense on openSUSE since there isn't a concept of supported vs. unsupported. I added a patch a month or two ago that made that option configurable so openSUSE users don't have to deal with the meaningless noise. 1) still exists on openSUSE, so it made sense to keep it around.
The thing is that it's _annoying_ to install both $flavor-base and $flavor since $flavor-base can be installed on its own and then it tries to run a mkinitrd on a system that may not be completely installed yet. I don't recall the bug number off the top of my head, but I've seen it a few times where users report "FATAL: can't find module ..." It turns out that the condition isn't fatal in that case but there's no easy way to convey that to the user or suppress the message in the case that kernel-$flavor will be installed on top of kernel-$flavor-base.
RPM allows you to put files in multiple packages built from the same spec file. Not only unique files, but duplicate files too. So instead of having a kernel-$flavor and kernel-$flavor-base with a dependency link, now you need one or the other depending on your need. It takes up slightly more space on the install media but improves the user experience. If you had kernel-$flavor installed before, then that's all you'll need. If you ONLY had kernel-$flavor-base installed before, then that's all you'll need.
-Jeff
If I had accepted the base package instead of the bigger one and it didn't support my xfs root wouldn't I have had a problem? Overall it makes sense to have a unified package, it certainly solves the error message problem, I'm just curious as to why there is still an x86_64 and i586 kernel-desktop-base package as well.
Yeah, you would've had a problem because it wouldn't have been the right kernel for your system. Did it offer that as a higher priority option? The base package exists for users who want to use virtualized systems but don't want to waste the space of storing all the modules they'll never use. It's sort of a baseline in that it only contains the bare essentials for the most common virtualized use cases (i.e. ext3, disks, MD, DM, loopback). The package set can be changed based on feedback, though. -Jeff -- Jeff Mahoney SuSE Labs -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+help@opensuse.org