[gentoo-dev] Speaking of new kernels being added to the tree

[Brad Laue <brad@gentoo.org>]

Just reading the suse-sources thread - good idea, but I have a 
suggestion first.

I think we should wait on the inclusion of anything kernel related into 
the CVS tree until some more thought is put into how we're managing our 
kernel sources.

The kernel team seems to be both the smallest and most behind the times, 
and this is sad given that they're one of the most important teams 
involved in the project. We're two kernel versions behind (and don't 
justify that by claiming 2.4.21 or 2.4.22 had bugs, that doesn't fly), 
and show no signs of making it to a 2.4.23 release.

The kernel team needs more people. It needs to drastically reduce the 
number of kernels in the tree which are of a customized nature 
(xfs-sources, gs-sources, wolk-sources) until it can manage 
gentoo-sources in a timely fashion. The kernel team needs to build a 
subset of patches which form the core of the gentoo kernel. They then 
need to enable all the additional features provided by xfs-sources, 
wolk-sources and gs-sources on a per-use-flag basis, rather than having 
three kernels to manage, each with three different sets of incompatible 
patches. There obviously aren't enough resources to manage this.

Optionalizing features through the use of USE flags only makes sense. 
This is how all other things are done in Gentoo. I don't have nor do I 
intend to create six mozilla ports based on all the different sets of 
potentially incompatible USE flags present in the one ebuild, because to 
do so would make it impossible to manage. Why is the kernel any 
different? Why do many different people manage their own patchsets 
without collaborating and sharing resources to keep our official one up 
to date?

Brad.


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