kernel updates from external trees

[Michael A. Peters]

I'm not a redhat/fedora developer - but my experience with past versions
of red hat is that once a distro reaches release, they generally do not
make any more changes to it other than bug fixes.

There is a very good reason for this - when you add new code to the
kernel, you have a greater chance that something will break that someone
depends upon. Especially the ability to compile a third party driver
against the kernel source.

When FC2 is released, people who develop third party drivers will work
to get their drivers building against the Fedora kernel source. If an
update to the kernel changes something they depend upon, then Fedora
users won't be able to build a new module until the third party updates
their driver to match the changes made by Fedora.

You can get updated kernels with various cool things hacked into them
from third parties, or even from development trees within Fedora, but
you probably are only going to find bug fixes within the stable kernel
for any given version.

I use to think that was a bad thing, but now I have come to realize it
is a good thing.

On Mon, 2004-04-26 at 17:11, Josh Boyer wrote:
> In general, what is the frequency that the fedora/redhat kernel folks
> grab updates from external source trees?  I am mostly interested in how
> often it is done for JFFS2, but there are other trees (such as linuxppc)
> where development is done outside of the kernel.org tree that has a
> value to end users.
> 
> Some trees don't push to Linus very often (like JFFS2) for various
> reasons, so are users getting whatever is in the vanilla kernels?  Or,
> do the fedora/redhat people do their own patches?
> 
> I am not expecting a schedule or some set update frequency.  I am mostly
> just asking to see if it is done at all, and if so get a rough estimate
> as to how often.
> 
> thx,
> josh
-- 
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