Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 15:53 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
1. If it's okay for RH to put nonstandard kernels into Fedora, then
shouldn't it be okay for the community to put nonstandard kernels into
Fedora? If not, why not?
I think the reasons why we don't want to do this have been made quite
clear. Its a maintenance nightmare. I already told the OpenVZ folks that
we couldn't have a "VZ enabled" kernel package in Fedora unless it went
into upstream (or they could convince Dave Jones to include it in his
SRPM).
Just to share some exposure into what it takes to keep a non-standard
kernel working in the Fedora tree:
- Pretty much a full-time dedicated highly experienced kernel developer
to spend the vast majority of their time playing patch monkey to keep up
with the high rate of upstream change. We have someone doing this role
for Xen and its more than a fulltime job. Same thing would have to
happen for an OLPC kernel. Certainly the amount of work is commensurate
with the nature of the changes. Having seen the RT patch set, that is
invasive and would also require similar effort.
- Above has to be done daily, virtually in realtime. The minute that
kernel build breaks (which will be frequently), it will be disabled in
the build makefiles. If it remains disabled for extended periods of
time then end users in the community get disgruntled.
- DaveJ is currently teetering on the edge of sanity, and doesn't need
one more straw to break the camel's back.
- As was pointed out earlier, the path to the Fedora kernel leads from
upstream.
In short, its generally hugely expensive in terms of ongoing manual
labor/torture to keep another kernel afloat. Not to mention that as
Matt points out, any layered kernel modules (ie the dirty decoder/codec
like stuff) won't work, or otherwise fragment the user base.
