Re: kernel question

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 12:30:27PM +0100, Richard Kimber wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 10:49:03 +0200
> Stephan Hachinger <stephan.hachinger@gmx.de> wrote:
> > But, for different configurations, there is only _one_ source
> > package. The bf2.4 and 686 and so on flavors only refer to different
> > *configurations* of sources before building. The
> 
> Thanks for your very helpful reply.  So, the only difference between the
> various kernels offered by Debian is the way they've been configured, and
> that no patches have been applied to produce the different kernels?

Not entirely ... look at the build-dependencies of the source package
(use 'apt-cache showsrc <package name>') to see whether it uses any
kernel-patch packages in its build process. For instance:

  $ apt-cache showsrc kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs
  Package: kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs-i386
  Binary: kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs, kernel-headers-2.2.20-reiserfs
  Version: 2.2.20-4
  Priority: optional
  Section: devel
  Maintainer: John H. Robinson, IV <jaqque@debian.org>
  Build-Depends: bin86, debhelper, gcc272, modutils, kernel-source-2.2.20 (>= 2.2.20-2), kernel-package (>= 7.41), kernel-patch-2.2.19-reiserfs (>= 3.5.34-1), tar (>= 1.13.18)
  Architecture: any
  Standards-Version: 3.5.4
  Format: 1.0
  Directory: pool/main/k/kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs-i386
  Files:
   b8cdb05431507eae8c2ffc8a303638b3 788 kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs-i386_2.2.20-4.dsc
   280be527fe10ff385c9768f9f80da2ce 6150 kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs-i386_2.2.20-4.tar.gz

You can see that this kernel image has been built using the standard
kernel-source-2.2.20 and an additional patch in the form of
kernel-patch-2.2.19-reiserfs (which must still apply to 2.2.20, I
suppose). This system saves a lot of duplicated disk space in the
archives and a lot of duplicated maintainer effort.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]