Re: Bug#219582: ITP: linux -- Linux 2.4 kernel

[Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Robert Millan wrote:

>I wouldn't. I'm going to track the latest minor version, just like the rest
>of Debian packages do.

You really, massively, hugely fail to understand the problem here. The
upstream kernel tree works on a small number of architectures. To deal
with this, several other architectures have their own trees. These trees
may be roughly synchronised with the kernel.org tree - in most cases,
they're not (they may be utterly broken at the point where 2.4.x comes
out, for instance, resulting in the next usable version of their kernel
being somewhere around 2.4.x+1). There are some sub-architectures where
the maintainer resynchronises their tree against the kernel.org one
every 6 months or so, and in the intermediate period is still working on
2.4.(x-5). Always packaging the latest minor version would kill Debian
on a wide range of machines.

But, of course, you know this already, because you've researched these
issues in advance.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.devel@srcf.ucam.org