[Test-Announce] Fedora 14 Alpha RC3 Available Now!

[Kevin Kofler]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Sorry but no.   There is only one kernel for the entire distribution and I
> rather rely on kernel maintainers expertise on their packages rather than
> SIG's trying to dictate what patches the kernel should carry.  The SIG
> participants are not kernel developers.

But sometimes the maintainers of individual package maintainers have to cave 
in to allow for a coordinated distribution experience. That's why we are a 
distribution and not a bunch of packages thrown together.

> If non upstream patches is needed, it requires someone to take ownership
> of keeping the patches updated for the kernel updates.  If you are
> volunteering to do that work,  please talk to the kernel developers.

I would, but my experience is that they'll probably say "no" anyway. I know 
it has been offered in the past, for various out-of-tree patches and kernel 
modules, they only accepted it in very few cases (e.g. for Hans de Goede's 
webcam driver stuff because he also worked on getting the stuff merged 
upstream, not just into Fedora; but it's far from easy for somebody who's 
not already an experienced upstream kernel developer to manage that, LKML is 
a tough place: there's politics making it hard for new contributors to get 
their stuff in, there are many rules (technical, cosmetic (i.e. code 
formatting rules), and social) you have to learn over the time, and the 
kernel is also a hard codebase to work with in the first place; it's a lot 
easier to regularly rebase a patch than to make it palatable to upstream, 
that's why there are so many out-of-tree patchsets).

        Kevin Kofler