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Martin Schulze wrote: | What does sid have to do with woody? The problem is that of providing an upgrade path from woody to sarge on real i386 machines. Glibc (and everything else in userland) in sarge/sid requires a kernel with the i486 emulation patch for such machines. There is no such kernel in woody. The kernels in sarge/sid cannot be installed on a woody system because they require newer modutils and initrd-tools, which require new glibc.
The best solution anyone has come up with is to provide a kernel in woody which can be installed in woody on real i386 machines, and which includes the i486 emulation patch. Once that is installed, the upgrade to sarge can then be performed.
If you have a better solution, be sure to suggest it, but I don't think there is one. (Recall that the requirement of the 486 emulation patch was necessary to deal with a major, difficult ABI problem for C++.)
If you have specific preferences for the form this updated kernel will take (perhaps you'd prefer a patched version of 2.4.19?), hash it out with Herbert. I don't particularly care what form it takes, as long as there's a way to upgrade a real i386 from woody to sarge without going outside Debian.
This must be solved before sarge can be released, given the consensus that i386 support was not going to be dropped; and there is no known way to solve it within sid/sarge. It could be done by setting up a special page on www.debian.org for downloading the patched kernel packages, and pointing all real i386 users to that in the Sarge release notes; but it seems much more sensible to put the patched kernel release in a point update of woody, and point the real i386 users to *that* in the Sarge release notes.
Hope this helps explain the problem, why it's 'critical', and why it has something to do with woody.
- --Nathanael Nerode -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
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