On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 03:45:46PM +0200, guy keren wrote: > i think people keep forgetting (or don't know) somehting fundamental about > kernels and distributions. there is the 'vanilla' kernel, which linus > handles (for the 2.5, i.e. current development version) or marcelo > what's-his-name keeps (the 2.4 version - linus moves maintenance of > "stable" non-development kernels ot other people. i'd imagine alan cox > still maintains the 2.2 kernel version).
He does. David Weindhall (IIRC) still maintains 2.0.x(!). > now, the major distributions usually take some semi-stable vanilla kernel, > and add 10s of patches to it, that float around the internet, and that > were not incorporated into the vanilla kernel. > > in redhat specifically, if you open the RPM of the kernel sources, you'll > see they took soem vanilla kernel, and added more then a hundread patches > to it - patches they write, or they collect from other sources. why those > patches are not in the vanilla kernel? this could be either due to policy, > or due to timing (you can add too many patches to a given kernel revision, > and expect it to remain stable without a given cycle of 'testing' - and > vanilla kernels don't go through format testing). Usually it's because those patches solve a real world problem which redhat's customers want, but solve it in a way that is not entirely "clean" or "generic" enough to pass the scrutiny of the vanilla maintainer. > also note that bugs occur. and bugs exist. and bugs get added. don't be > surprised to stumble upon bugs, especially not in software that has > thousands of different configurations in which it may be compiled. the > kernel dependencies system is not complete and considered a half-hack (at > least the one that comes with the 2.4 kernels - no idea what eventually > happened with the 2.5 kernel source tree) - and thus it cannot properly > catch all dependencies in the kernel. It's much improved in 2.5 - it's actually supposed to work now. All I can say it that it hasn't bit me where it hurts yet in 2.5. -- Muli Ben-Yehuda "The speed of light really is too slow nowdays." -- Alan Cox ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
