Re: bits from the release team
On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 10:34:43PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 12:23:31AM -0200, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (faw) wrote:
> > 1. http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/12/3/55
>
> > Perhaps the idea of maintain a kernel with other distros is not bad,
> > if Ubuntu shows up as a candidate, I would like to add Progeny, Linspire,
> > Xandros, "DCC Alliance Fan Club" and also other Debian Derivatives. I really
> > don't know if it is possible to mix RH, Debian, SuSE, Slackware and
> > other distros to maintain the same kernel, but certainly should be possible
> > to get all Debian (and Debian based/derivative) playing together. :-)
>
> The biggest obstacle to this is that different distributions have different
> and contradictory requirements for what ships in the kernel. For Debian,
> the obvious requirement is that everything we ship in main meets the DFSG;
> this is a requirement that is not shared by Ubuntu, for instance, which
> means any collaboration on kernels between those two distros has to allow
> for different bits being stripped out at the time of source package
> generation.
>
> It would certainly be nice to see improvements in kernel collaboration, and
> I believe it is possible, we just have to be honest with ourselves about the
> difficulties involved.
Also, notice that cooperation with the ubuntu kernels was more marked when
Fabionne was the ubuntu kernel maintainer, but now that he has passed the
relay, i feel that it is less. We have proposed to them to use a common
infrastrcuture with enabled/disabled patches for both, but the reply was
mostly of the kind, yeah we would like to cooperate, and no actions followed.
I believe it has also an influence on the place where the source package is
ohold (alioth svn repo over whatever strange stuff ubuntu uses), and they said
we should use their system.
So, altough patches can occasionally be exchanged, i doubt that cooperation
will go further for control-and-politics reason, and i believe it is maybe
best so for both involved. There can be cooperation without sharing all the
infrastructure and packaging. Other less high-profile daughter-distros are
probably simply reusing the debian kernel, and this is probably the best way
of doing this.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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