dkms package causes linux-headers-* packages stay in the system forever consuming disk space

[Vasya Pupkin]

Because of some veird dependency in dkms package, on each kernel upgrade old linux-headers-* packages are not getting removed, consuming a lot of disk space. Finally, root partition runs out of space which causes serious issues. Without dkms, everything works fine. I checked dependency and it indeed recommends all old packages.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: dkms 2.1.1.2-2ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-40.87-server 2.6.32.57+drm33.23
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-40-server x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Mar 23 15:38:38 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 10.04.2 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20110211.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: dkms

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

dkms doesn't directly depend on a particular version of linux-headers, but just on having at least one of the metapackages installed.

Normally kernel upgrades don't remove old versions, that's up to the user to do with something like Computer Janitor. If anything this is a bug in the way that apt will figure out the dependency chain not a bug in DKMS.

[Vasya Pupkin (shadowlmd)]

You are wrong. When dkms package is not installed, on kernel upgrade old headers are automatically deleted. You can verify that yourself. The problem is that dkms package has "linux-headers" in dependencies which is a virtual package that lists all possible versions of linux-headers-*. It should instead depend on either of linux-headers-generic, linux-headers-server, linux-headers-virtual, etc. These metapackages always depend on latest version of linux-headers-* allowing old headers to be automatically uninstalled.

It's not a bug in dkms itself, but a bug in it's packaging.

[dino99 (9d9)]

Support for this version has ended