Only a few people will probably have noticed the mess resulting from tons of different kernel packages in the stable (and unstable) distribution. Not only there are several versions of kernel source in each architecture, they are also different for most architectures. Only mips and mipsel share the same kernel source.
To make it worse, there are also third party kernel modules that depend on a particular version of the kernel source (they don't depend on the particular Debian revision, though, I hope). As a result of this, it is almost impossible to update the kernel in a released Debian distribution. Removing one kernel version and including another without rebuilding all modules packages will break several installations. Not removing the old packages will make the archive grow through time which will cause problems with CD build scripts. Hence, it is important that when a new kernel is added (e.g. for security reasons) an older package is removed *and* all relevant modules packages are rebuilt and included as well. I wonder if there are ways and efforts to improve the situation for sarge. I would be glad if somebody could investigate the modules situation and describe which modules packages require which kernel versions (and/or depend on which other packages). I also wonder if there are efforts in progress to unify the kernel source through more than two architectures? This would require a group or architecture maintainers (current kernel package mantainers) to work collaboratively towards this goal. Regards, Joey -- Ten years and still binary compatible. -- XFree86 Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.