This Space Intentionally Left Blank:

27 Germinal CCXII (April 15, 2004)

> conflicts 1a 2a 3a 4a

If you're reading this, that means I successfully managed to move heimdall (database server) over to kernel version 2.6.5 and skoll (webserver) to kernel version 2.4.26. Heimdall wasn't too hard, it mainly consisted of searching around the various compilation errors until I discovered that enabling generic RTC emulation (required for just about any Linux calls to the RTC on a PPC machine) also required another option — nvram support — to be enabled. Skoll was a completely different story.

My original plan was to upgrade it to a 2.6 kernel as well. Unfortunately, it's running Debian stable, and module-init-tools, needed to load the 2.6.x modules, doesn't exist as a package in Debian stable. There are packages, but they exist only for testing or unstable.

Now, if there's one thing that's fun, it's trying to bring a package from testing onto a machine running stable. There's two ways to do this: the first is to download the binary package, and the other is to download the source to the package and build your own package. Each has their advantages and disadvantages, but they both have one thing in common: dependency hell.

Trying to bring in a pre-compiled package requires you to upgrade libc6, which in turn requires you to upgrade a huge chunk of your base packages to those found in testing. It's quicker than compiling, at least on an older (read: slower) machine, but it means those packages won't get upgraded until the stable version becomes greater than the installed testing version.

The other way, which is the way I went this time, involves getting the source, trying to compile it, getting the source for the pre-build dependency packages that exist only in testing, compiling those, compiling the original package, trying to install it, and then doing all the same over again for the packages dependencies. Like using a pre-compiled package, there are some packages that won't see any of the upgrades to the stable tree. However, there are fewer of them.

Of course, having done all this, I then found out that 32-bit SPARC SMP support is broken in 2.6.x.

Three points and my deepest sympathies to whoever gets the title.

Posted by g026r at 00:26

Comments

I think the title is a reference to IRIX, where you would use a command such as that to resolve conflicts during an upgrade. I think 'conflicts' is the command, and 1a, 2a, etc. are your choices for resolution of the conflict - I think the 'a' choices are "Don't install", but my memory is bad. (Yeah, I'm saddened that I have touched IRIX. =/ )

Posted by MEAT at 27 Germinal CCXII 09:55 (2004/04/15)

Actually, that's exactly right...