The zfs project's latest stable release does not officially support Linux 6.4.* yet, but your metapackage allows that version.

If someone installs zfs for that kernel version, they should already be aware that it can break at any point release of it. Your package doesn't "help" in that area.

If someone wants to be certain that zfs does not break with their kernel, they should install it for a supported version, which on current Arch is only the LTS kernels (6.1.x).

Also 'helper' packages are usually meant to have some executable in them, but this package is empty.

On 13 August 2023 04:52:52 GMT+02:00, Bin Jin <bjin@ctrl-d.org> wrote:

This is a meta package I created to prevent future mainline linux updates breaking zfs-dkms packages. zfs-dkms is closely tied to linux kernel versions and has a compatibility layer to add specific support for each major linux kernel release (e.g. "6.x").

So zfs-dkms has long been worried about linux kernel upgrades, a major upgrade could make dkms fail, and this happened a few times in the past since Arch is very edge on kernel version upgrades.

For users using zfs as root, this become critical if dkms is not noticed during "pacman -Syu". The system won't boot for next reboot.

This meta package will be updated for each zfs release, and updating the linux kernel version upperbounds accordingly.

<notify@aur.archlinux.org> 于 2023年8月13日周日 00:34写道：
MarsSeed [1] filed a deletion request for zfs-dkms-helper [2]:

Unneeded new metapackage. Name doesn't make sense, and description is
also not really understandable.

Users can install any linux kernel and the zfs-dkms module for it, or
a kernel-specific zfs module. This package does not add anything
useful, and it also has a hidden upper version constraint, which is
unnecessary.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/account/MarsSeed/
[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/zfs-dkms-helper/