So I found out today that emerge replaced my kernel without giving me much of a warning. (The sources, that is.) Although one can argue that I should have been paying more attention, I think I have an idea for an enhancement. Problem: The semantic behaviour expected of "emerge world" is to update your system to the latest stuff in portage, but installing a new kernel is not something to be trusted completely to an automated ebuild. Solution 1: Just install sources. This is what is done now, and it is an alright solution, but I think it suffers some problems. First, if it happens without a person being aware, it can lead to problems installing stuff like nvidia-kernel, etc. Solution 2: Drop a note to the user that a new kernel was installed, and that it is highly recommended to update the kernel. This solution to me seems like a good one, because it warns the user that the expected behaviour of make world was not accomplished, and that additional user action is required to complete the update process (sorta like what is already done with etc-update) Solution 3: Leave the kernel alone! The ebuild for the kernel doesn't actually install the kernel, so its different from other ebuilds. So leave it out of emerge world. If someone wants to install a new kernel, they will install it themselves with an explicit command! --- Anyways, these are suggestions. Personally, I like solution 3 the best. But I thought I would at least bring it up.
I like the idea about keeping the kernel out of 'emerge world'. Not long ago, a bug in portage made it AUTOCLEAN when using the --fetchonly option. (Almost lost my gcc and glibc :| ).
duplicate of 14737?
*** Bug 14737 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
> First, if it happens without a person > being aware, it can lead to problems installing stuff like nvidia-kernel, > etc. Unless I'm missing something, that needs a kernel to be manually configured, compiled and installed and ran by the end user, so I don't really see the problem here...
I also don't see a problem: portage will only install the sources in a new directory, it won't touch your running kernel or old sources without explicit instructions (aka emerge unmerge) and it doesn't touch the /usr/src/linux symlink if it already exists. And if you don't want new kernel sources on emerge world remove the sys-kernel packages from your world file, so it won't get updated. If there are no objections I'll close this bug as INVALID.
no objections from kernel team, so closing it now.
