Re: kernel patches and source

[Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu>]

James Troup <james@nocrew.org> writes:

> Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu> writes:
> 
> > The only UltraSparc kernel image in Debian is compiled from
> > kernel-source-sparc-2.2.1 (a CVS kernel with some additional patches
> > added).

> This is serverly wrong.  The kernel-patch mechanism works and exists
> for a reason; we do not need or want to bloat the archive with
> redundant copies of the none-too-small kernel-source*.{tar.gz,deb}.

I know this, but at the time I had not figured out how to get
kernel-package to generate both sun4u and sun4[cdm] kernels (hence I
needed my own rules file) - kernel-package was subsequently fixed (and
broken again - I'm not sure what the current state is).

I repeated asked for someone to take the kernel package off of my site
and do a correct kernel-package version, but I got no takers. Thus I
was forced to make the custom package, so we would have some source
for the kernels in slink. (There was no 2.2.1 source for other
architectures, so this wasn't that big of a deal.)

Note that since then I have gotten kernel-package to nicely generate
sun4u kernels, and the necessary sparc patches have been integrated
into Linus' source - but we haven't had a stock source tree that ran
well on all machines until 2.2.9.

> > As soon as the i386 guys get around to uploading 2.2.9 (which needs
> > no patches to run on all sparcs), I'll fix this.

> It's already there.

Recently added to the archive - it wasn't there a couple of days
ago. (I was told by the maintainer that it would be uploaded two weeks
ago.)  I'm building the kernels now.  (sparc64 is done, I'm now doing
sparc and the headers.)


Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu