Bug#623441: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: should (indirectly) depend on kernel 2.6.38
tags 623441 + wontfix
thanks
Am 20.04.2011 um 11:24 schrieb Christoph Groth:
> Cyril, thank you for your quick reply.
>
> Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org> writes:
>
>>> The package xserver-xorg-video-nouveau was upgraded, but as it does
>>> not depend on a linux 2.6.38, the installed kernel was still version
>>> 2.6.32. Subsequently, the xserver failed to start (logfile included
>>> below).
>>
>> Then you didn't upgrade to the most recent state of Debian testing
>> since we made sure it had 2.6.38 before letting that version of
>> nouveau in.
>
> I executed "aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade". Kernel 2.6.38
> was available in the repositories but did not get installed
> automatically, as I had installed linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64 directly
> instead of linux-image-2.6-amd64 (which depends on the latest 2.6
> kernel).
>
>>> I suggest to make xserver-xorg-video-nouveau depend (indirectly) on
>>> kernel 2.6.38 to resolve this issue.
>>
>> AFAICT, that's not possible, and even if it was, it wouldn't guarantee
>> you're running the needed kernel; and how do you support home-built
>> kernels?
>
> I see now that /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau/README.Debian
> mentions that at least kernel 2.6.34 is required for this package to
> work. I was not aware that there is no way to state such a dependency
> in a way which is understood by dpkg.
It is indeed not possible for us to depend on a particular kernel
version, so there is nothing we can do besides mentioning the problem.
So I'm tagging the bug wontfix, which really means "cantfix" in this
case.
> That's a pity, because after executing the familiar "update &
> full-upgrade", I suddenly ended up without a working X. This might be a
> serious problem for users who are not comfortable to work from the
> command line.
Note this is only a problem for users who have explicitly configured
nouveau as their driver in xorg.conf or do not have the
xserver-xorg-video-fbdev package installed. In the normal case without
an xorg.conf, X falls back to fbdev automatically.
> As this seems to be a rather rare case where a package is tightly bound
> to a specific kernel version, perhaps a good solution would be a
> postinst script which checks whether a compatible nouveau module is
> installed and warn if not?
Probably not such a good idea, since xserver-xorg-video-nouveau is often
automatically installed (as a dependency of xserver-xorg-video-all) on
systems where it is not used, e.g. computers without an Nvidia card.
Cheers,
Sven
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