Am 08.11.2011 03:10, schrieb Linus Torvalds:
> Which brings me to a question I already asked on G+ - do people really
> need the old-fashioned patches? The -rc1 patch is about 22MB gzip-9'd,
> and part of the reason is that all those renames cause big
> delete/create diffs. We *could* use git rename patches, but then you'd
> have to apply them with "git apply" rather than the legacy "patch"
> executables. But as it is, the patch is almost a third of the size of
> the tar-ball, which makes me wonder if there's even any point to such
> a big patch?

From a distro packager's point of view, I can say this:

For packaging, we always use the latest .0 release tarball and patch it
with the -stable patch files from kernel.org. It would be desirable if
those would keep working with GNU patch - not necessary though because
'git apply' doesn't require a git repository.

When packaging development versions of the kernel, it is much easier to
pull the lastest code directly from the git tree, so I never needed the
patch files for the -rc's.