[Pkg-xen-devel] Re: [Pkg-xen-changes] r55 - trunk/debian [u]

[Guido Trotter]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 12:20:31AM +0100, Ralph Passgang wrote:

Hi,

> At least that was the situation I had with my packages as I tried the upgrade 
> on a production system. it was because some libs have moved from one binary 
> package to another and dpkg refuses to overwrite files that are still 
> installed within another package. I guess that problem still exists.
> 

Then we need for the new package to have a "Replaces:" on the first one...

> upgrading when running a non-xen kernel with no vm's running should be fine 
> (besides the issue mentioned already), but if you try it within a xen2 
> kernel/hypervisor the new xen3 userspace utils will most likely not be able 
> to communicate with the hypervisor anymore, so you cannot use "xm"-tools to 
> safely shutdown vm's anymore.
> 

It seems to me that upon upgrade xendomains is called with "stop" which means
the machines will be safely shut down (this happens in the older xen's prerm
script)... Then they probably won't be able to restart before a reboot... Should
we perhaps add some more checks to our xend/xendomains script and make it check
the hypervisor/kernel version somehow before starting? The reboot is needed
anyway, so...

We could also do other things to ease upgrade! (like permit parallel
installation of the old and the new hypervisor, or save the older utilities
somewhere) But they seem an overkill to me, and risk creating more bugs than
solving them! And people will probably imagine (and if they don't we can tell
them in the usual NEWS file that they cannot upgrade lightly hoping all their vm
won't be touched at all!)

> besides that, I tested the package based on the latest testing.hg + our svn 
> debian files and it worked flawlessly for me.
> 

Great!

> I agree to release the package as soon as the "upgrading" problem is tested 
> and if needed fixed.
> 

Ok,

Guido