(Joey, in the highly improbable case you would have missed this in -release)
> Not only are they. They are OBSOLETE, and UNMAINTAINED upstream. No need to shout, I think, especially at our release managers..:-) > Last summer, 2.6 wasn't working properly on hppa (much borkage) and the > only reasonably working kernel we had back then was 2.4. Though, 2.4 > support was already a _HACK_ and much effort was put into 2.6, with the > aim of getting rid of 2.4 ASAP. > > Back then, it was emphasised that Sarge might release anytime soon, so we > decided to take the safe approach and go with 2.4. > > Now 6 months have elapsed, and things are the complete opposite: 2.4 is > completely obsolete, and 2.6 works smoothly. Unfortunately, and as far as I can tell, there hasn't been much activity and interaction with the d-i team about this. So, it turns out that the 2.6/installer combination is very likely to be nearly untested. Having hppa installs be really tested was already a challenge given the obvious low interest in that architecture (no offense intended, just a conclusiong taken from months following debian-boot). I'm not even sure that hppa installs are really well tested, by the way. Joey could tell more and this probably needs more input from him. He may even correct me if I'm completely wrong. > > So ranting about not having received proper advice a few months ago is a > moot point. Well, again, Joey Hess could probably tell more but even if what you mention above has been explained, not having enough interaction between the hppa kernel team and the d-i team is quite likely to be the real problem here. Just telling "well, guys, we want to abandon 2.4 ASAP" is probably not enough and is quite likely to be either ignored or missed if noone motivated jumps in debian-boot and discusses this issue more deeply. After all, not everyone (and maybe noone) in the d-i team is thinking daily about hppa installs...