arla 0.12 has missing modversions.h

[Dr A V Le Blanc]

The new arla 0.12 works quite well on a stable Debian system;
that is, it has no new problems and fixes some of the old ones.
I can still hang the machine by asking for a lot of data from
arla at once; for example, a mkisofs job to write a GNU cd
of a mirror of prep.ai.mit.edu's /pub/gnu directory (excluding
the Hurd files) reliably causes the machine to hang, but this
was also true of earlier arla versions.  Debugging a hung machine
is always a pain, since you can't easily find out what's happened;
I say `hung' although the machine still pings; a shell internal
command on a previously negatively niced process fails to complete
overnight, so it may just be a serious (unacceptable) slowdown.

Someone wrote:
> this may be trivial, but recent versions of xfs/linux/xfs_locl.h
> have not included the header file <linux/modversions.h>.

Magnus Ahltorp <map at stacken.kth.se> wrote:
> Correct behaviour of modversion handling has always been a problem. It
> works perfectly on RedHat 5.1 if you run a 2.1 kernel (sparc) compiled
> with version support.
> It also works on a Slackware system (with libc5 and 2.0 kernel).

And, as I said, it works perfectly on a Debian system.  I believe
the modversions.h file is no longer created with the most recent
stable kernels?  In any case, it does not seem to be necessary to
have a modversions.h file at all now, whereas some older versions
of arla allowed you simply to create an empty file and compile
with that.

     -- Owen
     LeBlanc at mcc.ac.uk