Re: Maintaining kernel source in sarge
On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 11:00:34AM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote:
> But the pristine kernel source and the Debian patch are already available
> to the architecture maintainers:
>
> apt-get --tar-only source kernel-source-2.4.xx
> apt-get --diff-only source kernel-source-2.4.xx
>
> So I don't think having a kernel-patch-debian by itself is of any value
> to the merging process. It also doesn't solve the problem that a new
> kernel-patch-debian may break the building of old kernel-image packages.
The diff for kernel-source-xx contains more than just the Debian-specific
changes to the source; for example, it contains the debian/ directory.
Also, source packages are much less straightforward to work with than binary
packages. For example, they cannot be used in dependency relationships.
If the current system works fine for the kernel package maintainers, it is,
of course, not my place to say how it should be done. I'll leave this to
the people doing the work.
> There is also the suggestion of a complete break down of all Debian
> changes should be made available. Unfortunately that is simply
> unmaintainable and unusable as the number of changes grows as the
> dependencies between the patches are complex.
A breakdown meaning separate patches, right? Some maintainers manage to do
this, but I agree that it is definitely more work than maintaining a unified
tree.
> I think perhaps we could find a middle ground. We can keep kernel-source
> as it is with all the patches applied. In addition to that, we can have a
> kernel-patch-debian package which depends on the kernel-source of the same
> upstream version containing patches that will take the kernel-source to
> the following source trees:
>[...]
> This approach has the following benefits:
>
> * The kernel-source binary contains all bug fixes as is. Guido raised a
> good point that if we separated the patches from the kernel-source, then
> users may miss out on the bug fixes. This is especially important in
> light of the current speed of upstream releases.
I agree; simply untarring /usr/src/kernel-source... should give most users
what they expect.
> * The pristine kernel-source is available in the binary archive. Many
> people have asked for this in the past and this makes it available in the
> form of a source tar ball plus a patch.
>
> * Per-arch kernel-image will no longer be made unbuildable by new
> kernel-source updates. This has always been a problem for those
> architectures using the main kernel-source archive.
>
> * The incremental patches should ease the merging process of those
> architectures that wish to incoporate Debian changes.
>
> * The incremental patches should also allow people to get only the updated
> kernel-patch packages if they wish.
All definite benefits. The one thing which seems to be missing is to ensure
that the arch-specific kernels do not miss out on important fixes (such as
security) to the main kernel source tree.
--
- mdz
Reply to: