Automatic Old Kernel Removal Spec Proposal

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On 6/14/06, James Purser <purserj at k-sit.com> wrote:
> Umm yup, as someone who runs a couple of custom modules, including the
> QEMU and VMWare modules, every kernel upgrade means a rebuild.

It seems feasible to have an apt-ebuild command that attempts to
maintain compatibility between vaguely gentoo-like custom built source
packages and the installed deb packages.

A simple design would be if "apt-ebuild install foobar" runs
"foobar-toinstall.sh", a script that downloads the source files,
compiles and installs them. Once foobar is installed "apt-ebuild
after-apt-get" would run "foobar-afteraptget.sh", a script which
checks whether the apt-get broke any of the dependencies for foobar,
and if so attempts to rebuild foobar.

>From my understanding, such a system could be quite useful where you
need a particular version of software, but that particular version is
not packaged for Ubuntu. Is there a better way of doing this?

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia