Re: when distros do not support official Marcelo kernels they are not being team players (was Re: reiserfs on redhat advanced server?)

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 09:20, Hans Reiser wrote:

> It is different from refusing to support the user who downloads 
> Marcelo's kernel after it does ship (after the distro CD went into the 
> stamping plant). That is what I am complaining about.  The default 
> should be to support all Marcelo kernels unless there is a motivated 
> reason not to (e.g. he ships a broken NFS kernel and the user is 
> complaining about NFS).  Users should feel that they can download any 
> latest official stable kernel (it is okay though to tell them to check a 
> website created by the distro to see if it is a known bad/unsupported 
> kernel), and everything will be fine with the distro.  When distros 
> don't do this, they are not being team players.

Hans, the vanilla kernels are lacking both bug fixes and features that
are critical to what our users are doing.  Even if the bug fixes all got
in, there are various reasons the features probably won't.  

If there was any vanilla kernel that had everything we needed, we'd
support it, and do a dance around a bonfire made from all of our patch
maintenance scripts and code.

The whole point of buying the distro is that you don't have the time and
energy to collect and compile every application and turn it into
something you can easily install on your personal machine.  The kernel
is one of those applications.  Feel free to replace it, but it doesn't 
make sense to expect us to help you fix the problems when we don't have
control over the configuration, compile or sources.

That would be like switching engines in your car and expecting the
original car company to do a warranty repair on the new engine.

-chris (speaking only for himself and not SuSE)