rawhide report: 20050819 changes

[Matthias Saou]

Build System wrote :

> * Thu Aug 18 2005 Florian La Roche <laroche at redhat.com>
> - change the requires into a conflicts for "kernel"

Just wondering since there have been a few of these today : Isn't it the
other way around, i.e. isn't having a requirement better than conflicting
*all* older versions for kernels?

I'm asking because many people (including me), have been bothered by
conflicts on old kernel versions when trying to upgrade from a
distribution version to another using apt or yum, as *any* old kernel
still installed will break the dependencies.

For instance, if you upgrade from a system running FC "N" with kernel
2.6.0 (still installed) to the newer version FC "N+1" with kernel 2.6.10
which includes packages conflicting with kernel < 2.6.5, then things will
have to start getting ugly (upgrading by bits, removing the running
kernel, removing --justdb etc.) :-(

Package requirements for kernels are only "informative" anyway, since
multiple kernels can be installed and the package management doesn't
depend on which one is currently running...

Anyway, usually machines are running the most recent one installed, in
which case a requires is fine. Furthermore, conflicts just force users to
remove old unused kernels... which doesn't solve the problem and only
causes headaches.

Some more thoughts?

Matthias

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