with 3~beta21 too, was: Re: "E: Broken packages" with 2.8

[Henning Sprang]

On 9/18/06, Toni Mueller <support-fai at oeko.net> wrote:
> [...]
> > You are using a developer version from the FAI apt repository, or the
> > version from Debian testing.
>
> The version I'm using comes from Debian unstable. The latest version I
> found in the Cologne FAI repository was 2.10.5.

There is also a development apt repository which should have always
the newest developer version.

> I chose to try the
> 3-something version when I hit too many problems with the 2.x version
> (latest problems were something with dpkg and no way to create a
> working NFSROOT)

Not being able to build a sarge NFSROOT on a sarge server, for sarge
installation with FAI 2.x seems like a very strange error. This easy
task should always be possible. Did you report details about this
proble to this list?

>, and that I'll need to have 3.x to install Etch OR on
> amd64 anyway. So... I think I'll probably change the configuration to
> (try to) install testing instead of sarge RSN.

What does RSN mean?

>I also understood some
> of the mails on this list as meaning that 2.10.x is more or less EOL'ed
> already.

With EOL you mean End of Live, and with that, that we don't support
FAI 2.x anymore, right?

Here's as I see it:
As far as I know, FAI 2.x is not being obsoleted or removed from the
FAI apt repo at Uni Koeln. Actually, it can't because for FAI 3 we
don't support compatibility to sarge, so we have to support it as long
sarge is stable, at least. There's no decision if we will provide
bugfixes for FAI 2.x until etch release  or even after that. I
problems are very heavy and there are a lot of users interested in
that, it will be possible.

> > Fai 3 and above isn't made to work on a sarge server and to install
> > sarge clients. This has been announced a while ago.
>
> Ugh. I somehow managed to miss the announcement that it won't run on a
> sarge server. Where should I be looking?

At least on fai-devel, maybe also somewhere on linux-fai, and maybe in
some changelogs.
In general, you should know that you cannot just install any package
from unstable on stable and expect it to work flawlessly, so an
announcement is nice, but not strictly necessary - you should now what
you do when using unstable :)

> > But If the only change that make FAI 3 still work on sarge, to install
> > sarge, are in the config files, then  this should be documented in the
> > wiki, I think.  Would be nice of you if you could provide you full
> > NFSROOT config file there to help others.
>
> Once I get it working...

Post further problems here, we might have answers. You can always grab
the fai sources, change and rebuild them yourself. Of course it would
be cool if we can retain backwards compatibilty.
Subversion access (so you are able to checkin your changes in a
developer branch for all to review and for thomas to put into trunk)
can be obtained from thomas by getting and account on alioth.

Henning