Re: http://debian.linuxwiki.de/DebianKernel_2fPlan
On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 04:41:20PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 07:52:15AM -0600, dann frazier wrote:
> > I believe its a greater maintenance mess to attempt to keep them united.
> > I can be more confident that upstream's ia64 arch patch will apply reasonably
> > well to a kernel-source tree, like what we have today, than if we try to
> > merge all of these architectures into a single mainline tree.
>
> Why?
We would be introducing the requirement to merge all the architectures patches, today
we don't have that requirement. Thus, more maintenance.
Maintaining an architecture patch package is trivial, and conflicts between the arch
and the base can be resolved & tested by a single maintainer for their arch.
> Upstream arch maintainers unfortunately are lazy, and instead of
> following that lazyness in the debian packages better help them.
My upstream is not lazy in this regard (sounds like partially due to your help).
> > There's also the infrastructure load that has been brought up on this list.
> > If we share a kernel-source tree (no arch packages), then each upload requires
> > a build on all architectures, and the corresponding storage space on our
> > mirror system. This would add an unnecessary barrier to entry for me to
> > fix a few bugs in my package & do an upload:
>
> well, if we want a reasonably maintained kernel we should do uploads
> about once a week anyway (that's still much less than the commcerial
> distros), and you small fixes would fit into this easily.
That requires more volunteer coordination than we require today.
This additional overhead has the potential of harming productivity, and I don't
see the benefit we receive from it.
> > I don't believe the security team gains anything by merging trees; in fact, I think
> > its a disservice.
>
> I'll let them speak for themselves..
>
> > Imagine the case of an s390-specific exploit - having to build
> > on 11 arches to deal with that surely won't save them any time.
>
> So when was the last s390-specific exploit you heard of? Or any
> architecture-specific exploit?
>
For instance:
kernel-patch-2.4.25-ia64 (2.4.25-2) unstable; urgency=high
* Added 2.4-sigcontext-nat-fix.diff from:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ia64&m=107774864921303&w=2
Which fixes a bug with the potential for silent data corruption.
-- dann frazier <dannf@debian.org> Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:54:46 -0700
(Required an update to stable as well).
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