Re: Maintaining kernel source in sarge
On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 01:51:05AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> SuSE don't have a single kernel source either. They have a set of
> a few hundred common patches plus some more patches (e.g. 200
> for s390) that are used only for one architecture, usually both 32 and
> 64 bit. Single patches can be enabled or excluded per architecture
> there.
Right. Still they have a single source package for all the achitectures
which is a good start. And I talked to people involved in their kernel
maintaince and they say they're trying to cut down these conditional
applies patches as much as possible because they are a maintaince
nightmare
> As a real-world example, kernel-patch-s390 can provide
> the ptrace bug fix from Martin Schwidefsky, while
> kernel-patch-debian contains the generic solution from Alan Cox.
This sounds like a really bad idea (okay, not worse than the
current situation but still bad). Martin should diff his patch ontop
of Alan, if it has other core changes he should really post it to
lkml and explain those. Now this unfortunately hasn't happend and
if it has incompatible core changes (I haven't checked) that's one
of those rare cases where you want to appy a patch condtionally.
> When building kernel-image-s390, make-kpkg would first apply
> the arch specific patches and the the arch independent ones that
> have not been superceded by an arch specific one.
Again that's a very bad idea. Arch-independent patches should
_always_ be applied before Arch-dependent ones, otherwiese applying
MI patches will get absolute horror.
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