Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-kernel] Proper distribution integration of kernel *-sources, patches and configuration.

[Tom Wijsman]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2013 12:33:30 -0700
Greg KH <gregkh@g.o> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 09:25:42PM +0200, Tom Wijsman wrote:
> > On Mon, 1 Jul 2013 14:09:57 -0500
> > Matthew Summers <quantumsummers@g.o> wrote:
> > > If the patchset patches the kernel's core, it doesn't matter what
> > > CONFIG_* option is set the core kernel code
> > > _has_now_been_changed_. This is the crux of the argument, I
> > > believe. AUFS simply being one example of this. I'm sure there
> > > are others.
> >
> > As per my response to that point, this statement is no longer true.
> >
> > Let me re-iterate it here:
> >
> > Earlier I mentioned "3) The patch should not affect the build by
> > default."; if it does, we have to adjust it to not do that, this is
> > something that can be easily scripted. It's just a matter of
> > embedding each + block in the diff with a config check and updating
> > the counts.
>
> Wonderful, now you are maintaining a patch that looks nothing like the
> one created by the original developers, nor tested by anyone else
> other than gentoo developers.

I can convert the original developer's patch whenever he updates it; or
on top of that, write a script to generate the original patch back.

> Playing fast-and-loose with kernel patches is a fun thing to do, but
> really, why?  Users love doing this type of thing, but the
> interactions of different kernel patches with core subsystems is
> almost always a non-trivial thing.

Our main intent is to provide them and deduplicate work; if users have
a problem with one of the patches and it isn't clear to us, we can
forward them to the authors. Nothing in this proposal inherits that we
must support the patches; especially not, since they are "experimental".

> I'm not saying not to do this, but consider this a friendly warning
> that this is going to be a MAJOR pain to maintain and debug over the
> long-run.

Maybe, maybe not; plan is to do a slow start, congestion avoidance. :)

> But hey, what do I know?  It's not like I've ever done this before and
> had the experience of the resulting fall-out that took years to
> recover from on user's production systems, causing a number of
> enterprise Linux companies to swear that they would never do this
> type of thing again...

I covered this in the conditions as well as the F.A.Q.; feel free to
read about it again, this does not affect them unless they explicitly
want them to enable CONFIG_GENTOO_EXPERIMENTAL which help includes a
warning; thinking it through, we might even suffix -exp to version.

> Personally, I wish you luck, it will push the sane users to the
> vanilla-sources tree, which I strongly encourage :)

I will push them to keep CONFIG_GENTOO_EXPERIMENTAL disabled. :)

> greg "kids, get off my lawn!" k-h

Gentoo (Penguin) and Larry do not necessarily like grass; they might
like ice, fire, water, earth, ... whatever their appetite craves.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@g.o
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
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