Re: Maintaining kernel source in sarge
On Fri, 23 May 2003 17:04, Martin Schulze wrote:
> I wonder if some people (Maybe Manoj and Russell, who are both quite
> competent) could help with this effort.
I would love to contribute, however at the moment I am over-committed already.
Progress towards getting SE Linux support in main is going well, when that is
sorted out I'll have a lot more spare time for such things.
> I have to admit, that having several architectures use the same plain
> kernel source from Linus Torvalds aka kernel.org could be problematic
> since many architecture ports use their own kernel repository which is
> not always synced with the main kernel tree for whatever reasons.
That's not a problem, you just have to run diff between the source tree for
the platform in question and the Linus tree.
It will make for some big patches (for example the patch for the kernel used
on Familiar is extensive and has not been ported to 2.4.20 because it's too
much work). Which raises another issue. Often (always?) some platforms
don't have support for the latest kernel. We can probably expect to have the
last three Linus kernels in our source tree for this reason.
The proceedures for determining which kernels to keep and which to drop will
also need to be worked out. We have ia64, hppa, and Familiar-ARM (*)
platforms with 2.4.19 support but no 2.4.20. When 2.4.21 comes out we can't
remove 2.4.20 source until after those platforms have support for 2.4.21 as
they may just upgrade from 2.4.19 to 2.4.20.
We will probably end up having a minimum of support for three different kernel
versions at all times. This is a lot better than supporting three source
trees for three architectures of the same kernel version! Even users of i386
often want old versions of the kernel source because of bugs (I recently had
a request for a 2.4.18 version of one of my kernel patches because 2.4.19 and
2.4.20 wouldn't work for someone).
Probably the first thing we should do is make some standards for kernel patch
packages. I suggest kernel-patch-2.x-NAME as the package name, and having
the three latest kernel versions supported for a stable kernel (except when
there aren't three versions of the patch with the same functionality and when
it's too difficult to back-port the code) and up to five patches for 2.5.x
kernels from the last 10 kernel versions.
(*) Familiar kernel isn't in Debian yet, but hopefully soon will be.
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