David Given wrote: > Unfortunately, the application has its own coroutine library that turns out > to > have a nasty conflict with linuxthreads (due to allocating its own stacks, > which causes linuxthreads to crash). linuxthreads is used as part of glibc on > 2.4 kernels. 2.6 kernels, such as the one I did the development on, are fine. > > Is it possible to specify this as part of the package dependencies, and if so > how, or am I just going to have to document the fact that it'll crash on > startup on a 2.4 system? Is this, in fact, not appropriate for inclusion in > Debian because of this?
To answer your first question: you cannot conflict against (or depend upon) specific kernel versions because there is no guarantee that an installed kernel package is the kernel that's running at the moment. A user might very well want to have a 2.4 and 2.6 kernel installed simultaneously, and plan to only run the app when booting into the 2.6 kernel. And a Conflicts wouldn't prevent a user from having a self-installed 2.4 kernel that was installed outside the packaging system (a case which I believe Debian supports, although I can't find a guarantee of such support in the Policy docs off-hand). What you _can_ do is to have a wrapper script around the application that aborts with an appropriate error message if it detects a running 2.4 kernel. It looks like your app is a daemon, so you could even do this in its /etc/init.d script if it's unlikely anyone would run it by hand. To answer the second question, I think it would be fine to have this app in Debian as long as the kernel version requirements were clearly documented in both the package long description (in the debian/control file) and a README.Debian file. But this is just MHO. regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
