Grok Mogger wrote: > Nick Boyce wrote: > >> The latest Debian Weekly News [1] mentions there are already tentative >> plans to add updated kernels to Etch during its lifecycle, specifically >> to add support for new hardware ... yay :-) > > Very cool! Thanks for letting me know. Of course, 9 months is still a > little long to wait for me. I still don't really get it. If the kernel > source from kernel.org is "stable", then is there really any harm in > having the Debian kernel keep up with that? Is the latest stable > release from kernel.org just not really tried and true enough for > Debian's standards?
I don't know the full details, but I do know Debian has its own set of changes and "optional" patch sets that it applies to "debianize" the standard kernel source ... these include security hardening, compatibility and stability patches. This is not unusual - all the major distributions have their own patch set they use to customise vanilla kernels. If you read the relevant developer mailing list traffic you'll find the choice of which vanilla kernel to include in any given Debian release usually takes a long time and much debate, as various incompatibilities with one or other of the many supported hardware types are thrashed out. I'm sure applying the Debian patch sets takes non-trivial time to apply to each successive vanilla kernel source release, and I recall the workload has caused more than one Debian kernel maintainer to have to give up and pass the baton on to someone else. Maybe it's just too much work to track every kernel.org release. There's actually nothing fundamentally wrong with just using the kernel.org sources to compile your own kernel, and many Debian users do just that (to get the latest doodads). Me, I tend to trust that the Debian kernel maintainers have good reasons for the Debian tweaks, so I go with their packages - and I try to avoid esoteric hardware too :-} Cheers Nick Boyce -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
