libxen3 in hardy-backports breaks Xen 3.2

[Evan Broder]

Xen 3.3 was recently uploaded to hardy-backports. The libxen3 package that came with this update breaks Xend on a system running Xen 3.2, but makes no attempt to upgrade the user from 3.2 to 3.3. This package should be renamed to libxen3.3, as was done for libxen3.0 and libxen3.1, and for parity with xen-utils-3.2 and other related packages.

[Obrouni (nick-fisk)]

This has also caught me out. I had backports enabled to get the latest version of mythtv, the 3.3 version of libxen3 slipped in with a load of updates and broke xen.

Currently trying work a way around it

[Thomy23 (thomas-stather)]

Hi

What is the current status on this, is it now safe to update Xen 3.2 to 3.3 vial the backports repository or will this break my system (i ask because this is a productive machine)?

Greets Thomas

[Evan Broder (broder)]

Running Xen 3.3 from backports was never an issue. The issue was turning on backports, but still wanting to run Xen 3.2.

[Thomy23 (thomas-stather)]

OK

I found a solution as the package in the backports is broken (problem with python). You have to backport xen-3.3 on your own as according to this doc:

http://bderzhavets.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/attempt-of-prevu-xen-33-hypervisor-at-ubuntu-hardy-dom0-2624-21-xen/

[Evan Broder (broder)]

Thomy23 - That doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know of anything wrong with Python in the Xen 3.3 packages in hardy-backports, so I think that's unrelated to this bug.

[agent 8131 (agent-8131)]

First of all, I don't think it can be stressed too often that turning on backports without using pinning is generally a very bad idea. For maximum stability you want to only pull in specific packages from backports.

That said I think a solution to this problem would be that (roughly):

* xen-utils 3.3.0 should depend on libxen3 >= 3.3.0 and should conflict with libxen < 3.3.0
* xen-utils 3.2.0 should depend on libxen3 >= 3.2.0 and should conflict with libxen >= 3.3.0

I'd say these are SRU worthy fixes and once backported would prevent this issue as well as a few others.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

The xen-3.3 source package has been superceeded by the xen package. If you still have this issue on 12.04 or later, please reassign to there.