open-vm-tools: to upgrade or not to upgrade

[Nicolas Chauvet]

2010/10/6 Denis Leroy <denis at poolshark.org>:
> I've been asked (#1429) to upgrade open-vm-tools in F-13. Now, this is
> causing me some headaches because the latest versions of open-vm-tools need
> the 2.6.34 kernels (because some of the modules provided by
> open-vm-tools-kmod were upstreamed in 2.6.34, so the open-vm-tools package
> no longer ships them, even though they're still needed for 2.6.33).

> The problem with F-13 is that is spans both the 2.6.33 and 2.6.34 kernels.
> In other words, if I push a more recent update of open-vm-tools, it will
> have to include something like
>
> Require: kernel >= 2.6.34
This will probably not match (because PAE varriant mostly), or you
might try with Requires: kernel-uname-r >= 2.6.34

> forcing the user to upgrade the kernel in order to install open-vm-tools. So
> the questions:
Users aren't expected to stay on older kernels. But when a userland
tool need to exactly match the kernel side component, we usually (done
for nvidia/fglrx) push the new update along with the kernel update.
Anyway, if one want to stay with an older kernel, he can also stay
with an older userland (yum-plugin-versionlock is made for that).

> - can kmods handle a dependency like this, so that 'yum install
> open-vm-tools' will correctly bring in the kernel updates ?
Conflicts:  kernel-uname-r < 2.6.34 would have made the job in a
userland situation. In this one this will not work as one can have two
kernel installed together (one 2.6.33 while running 2.6.34).

> I think the open-vm-tools update is for the Greater Good (tm), but I'm not a
> huge fan of forcing kernel upgrades on people...
So you currently force user to stay on older and possibily unaccurate
open-vm-tools for current fedora kernel instead, which isn't
necessarily a good either.

Nicolas (kwizart).