(CCed to debian-boot; hope you don't mind) On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 12:45:04PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote: > I noticed while reviewing the current Ubuntu diff for zlib that you've > added this: > > +zlib (1:1.2.3-13ubuntu3) feisty; urgency=low > + > + * Don't conflicts/replaces zlib1g-udeb in zlib1g; this makes d-i > + unnecessarily difficult to build. > + > + -- Colin Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:19:07 +0000 > + > > Could you possibly expand on the problem this causes a bit? Whenever I > added udeb support it was part of the udeb policy that that conflict > should be added - I'm guessing that that is no longer the case.
Bizarre, I really had thought I'd filed a Debian bug about this. Evidently not, and sorry about that ... I was digging my way desperately through a chain of dependencies that day. Anyway, the problem is that the d-i initrd build process uses apt-get to fetch the udebs it needs. In some ways this is a nasty kludge, because as it's set up at the moment apt-get is resolving dependencies with respect to the host system, so what's installed on the host system matters more than it perhaps ought to do. zlib1g-udeb is nearly always needed (at least in Ubuntu, which includes pciutils-udeb in all initrds; I think Debian may only need it in the GTK initrds at the moment), so apt-get nearly always has to "remove" zlib1g: it's set up so that it doesn't actually remove it from the host system, but it still has to do an enormous conflict resolution pass. I was running into situations where this meant that apt-get got just too confused to proceed, and bailed out on me. Once I removed that Conflicts, apt-get didn't have to do a conflict resolution pass at all, and the whole thing immediately became much simpler to build. As of now, zlib1g and ppp are the only packages in unstable that conflict with corresponding -udeb packages, so if this was part of the udeb policy then it doesn't appear to be now. I don't think it really buys anything much nowadays, as the package management tools will never try to install udebs on a normal system, and even if you try you'll generally get a file conflict anyway. The consequences of conflicting seem to be much worse than the problems solved by doing so. Thanks, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
