Comment 27 for bug 539814

Revision history for this message
Steve Langasek (vorlon) wrote : Re: [Bug 539814] Re: tar/gnulib bug prevents bootstraping Lucid on Dapper, causes Lucid upgrade to abort on older linux kernels (e.g. in a chroot or Xen VM)

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 10:35:49PM -0000, Nathan Stratton Treadway wrote:

> Ah! I see, there is currently no attempt to "support" any case where
> one's kernel comes from "outside" the Ubuntu installation being
> upgraded.

> As Dmitry mentions (and as indicated by the general discussion here), I
> think there are a lot of people who are using Ubuntu one way or another
> where that does happen. I wonder if there is any chance the Ubuntu
> project could come up with some "policy" regarding support for those
> situations (for Maverick, obviously).

I don't believe this is likely to happen, fwiw; we can certainly have the
discussion, but supporting two-year-old kernels for LTS upgrade purposes
already requires ongoing work, and I don't believe we're ever going to be
able to support running the Ubuntu userspace on an arbitrary non-Ubuntu
kernel except on a best-effort basis (like in this case).

> Anyway, on the topic of the Lucid release notes, I certainly understand
> the desire to keep them as short as possible. On the other hand, it
> really seems that even a user "advanced" enough to be running e.g. a Xen
> server would prefer to have *some* warning before initiating an upgrade to
> Lucid that is doomed to abort mid-upgrade this way (leaving
> dpkg/apt/aptitude in a "broken" configuration)....

When declining the release notes task I was thinking in terms of chroots
which can easily be recovered after the fact. Xen is obviously a different
matter; given that this also affects running on Xen, I agree we should
document this in the release notes.

> Perhaps a compromise would be to add a one-line paragraph saying
> something like "Users who would like to run Lucid using a kernel older
> than 2.6.24 should see <ThisPage>", pointing to a page somewhere under
> help.ubuntu.com or wiki.ubuntu.com. [Using "2.6.24" because that was
> the version in Hardy.]

> I would be willing to create the initial version of such a page,
> provided that you were interested in linking to it (and especially if
> someone what was more familiar than I am with the existing wiki/help
> pages could recommend a good location for creating it).

Under the circumstances, perhaps it's better to simply use the release notes
to warn users off of upgrading to 10.04 until these issues are fixed, and
focus on getting these SRUs done?

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
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