[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#874751: Bug#874751: Processed: severity of 874751 is grave

Hans van Kranenburg
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 14:49:25 -0000

Hi,

So, this is about:
  https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/blktap-dkms

Related (also with a long living ftbfs bug):
  https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/blktap

I can already tell that while the Debian Xen team is listed as
maintainer, the packages are not anywhere on the radar of the current team.

It seems the packages were added as part of packaging "The Xen Cloud
Platform (XCP)".

According to...
  https://www.xenproject.org/developers/teams/xapi.html
... "Before June 2013, XenServer was not fully open sourced and a subset
of XenServer called XCP was made available [...]"

...and...

  https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Blktap2
"Xen blktap2 is a successor to the old blktap1 disk backend driver.
[...] Xen blktap2 support is included in the Xen version 4.0 released in
Apr 2010."

...the XCP project was stopped in 2013 and this v1 of blktap has been
obsoleted upstream.

So, since this dkms was already not usable since Wheezy... What about
solving this by getting both of them removed from Debian?

The blktap source package also builds a library to access vhd files...
  https://packages.debian.org/sid/libvhd0
...but there seems to be an alternative for that, if anyone was using it...
  https://packages.debian.org/sid/libvhdi1

Hans