[Pkg-xen-devel] Feedback on merge of Xen-4.8.0

[Ian Jackson]

Ian Jackson writes ("Re: Feedback on merge of Xen-4.8.0"):
> Stefan Bader writes ("Feedback on merge of Xen-4.8.0"):
> > first thanks for picking up so many things in your
> > upload. Unfortunately it took me a while to merge this back into
> > Ubuntu. So it is a bit late for the feedback but I hope it still
> > helps a bit.
> 
> Thanks.  I will look at this today.
> 
> Debian's migration freeze is 10 days from today and there are now
> mandatory 10 day migrations.  So it is possible that whatever fix I
> come up with will need a freeze exception.

Looking at this some more, I think you are probably right that the
best answer is a xen-hypervisor-common package.

Another possibility would be to put this file in xen-utils-common,
which produces one fewer silly packages, but means that it is possible
to install the hypervisor in a way that means it won't be booted by
default and if you did boot it, it and the kernel would have
suboptimal command line arguments.

But: I don't think any of this needs to be done in Debian's Xen 4.8
packages.  I reason as follows: Debian's Xen 4.8 are coinstallable
with earlier packages because those earlier packages don't have this
file.

And in Xen 4.9 or 4.10, in Debian buster, we can introduce the new
package and put in a Replaces with transfers the conffile to the new
ownership.

I am going to test now to see whether that works well.  If it does I
will file a bug with the appropriate patch.

If it doesn't then it would be good to sort this out in stretch and I
will negotiate with the Debian Release Team about that.

FYI, apropos of your other comments: I came to the Xen packages quite
late in the stretch cycle, mostly because I felt we definitely needed
Xen 4.8.  So there are many things which I didn't want to change.

Early in buster I intend to completely overhaul the packaging.  I am
also one of the Xen upstream maintainers so I should be able to
dramatically reduce the Debian delta.

Ian.