Heads-up: brand new RPM version about to hit rawhide

[Andreas Ericsson]

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:10:51 -0400
>> Presumably one could replicate this as needed.  However, there is the
>> question of whether or not it's needed.  Remember that the concept
>> using an upstream tarball as the canonical source version that we
>> represent to the world that we are using is nothing more than a
>> policy decision. Nothing in the GPL or anything else said we had to
>> do that, it was just what we *chose* to do (long, long ago, in a
>> galaxy far, far away).
> 
> one thing to keep in mind... as comparison, what you don't want is what
> Ubuntu is doing with their kernel (clone Linus and then just edit the
> source tree); it's just one big nightmare (as you can imagine). Keeping
> upstream source and local patches separate is a clear winner (anyone
> who has worked on the alternative will agree with me).

Well, if they clone and then edit without using separate branches for
their various edits, then ofcourse it'll be a nightmare to manage.

If, on the other hand, they're seriously interested in pawing off their
changes back upstream in a way that makes it easy for the kernel devs
to get them back, they'll have their changes on various topic-branches
and issue "please pull" requests to the various kernel subsys developers,
just like every other kernel hacker does.

Personally, I would absolutely love finding a git repository with the
fedora kernels so I can send patches without spending 4-5 days finding
out how the hell one gets the kernel to the exact state that the one
I'm running was built from. The process of finding a kernel source
tree matching my exact version was actually so tricky I gave it up.
Now I'm running a custom home-made kernel, so my (nvidia) graphics
card doesn't work without additional hand-hacking.


> If those upstream sources are a tarbal, or a tagged commit... is a lot
> less relevant.
> 

Not for the casual developer with an itch to scratch. I had 6 full
days of work to spend on fixing the touchpad on my particular laptop
(see bugzilla.redhat.com #448656) so the system actually became usable
again, but since I couldn't duplicate the source-tree from the failing
fedora kernel, I had nothing to diff against, so no way in hell I could
send a patch.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231