No more kernel-source(code) ??? (was: rawhide report: 20040623 changes)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 13:18 -0400, David T Hollis wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 13:26 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> > > Yes, but that's ugly to look at :-)
> > 
> > So what?  smp is ugly too, but it's there because it's useful.  It
> > fixes a real problem, and it doesn't hurt much, so...

> This seems like a pretty workable approach that can make things work for
> all sides.  I suppose Anaconda would need some tweaking so it knows to
> install kernel-i586 instead of plain ol' kernel but it already has that
> logic for handling the smp case.

Alexandre was suggesting in the version or release, not the name or even
just in the uname output and not as part of the name.  I still think
that encoding the arch somehow that's visible to uname is kind of ugly,
especially when you consider some of the arches (ppc64iseries anyone :)

As far as the difficulty of kernel-i586, having kernels named something
other than 'kernel' makes things in anaconda _extremely_ difficult (and
also then makes it hard to figure out what kernel someone has
installed).  

I'd love to see kernel-smp get folded into the main kernel package to be
honest and as we move towards things like HyperThreading being present,
it makes more and more sense.  For the little bit of performance hit due
to spinlock overhead, it would be good to get to where that can be
minimized as much as possible and then everybody ends up being better
off. 

Jeremy