Re: [OT] Unofficial but Supported Kernel Patches

Rob Landley
2002-05-15T19:41:55Z

On Sunday 12 May 2002 11:01 pm, John Weber wrote:

> [2] Kernel Programming Documentation. This would mostly document the
> kernel API, and important kernel data structures, as well as "good
> habits" in kernel development -- like "don't use virt_to_bus use
> blah,blah,blah". Information like this might be useful to kernel
> janitors. (This probably exists already).

Yeah, but filtering, collating, editing, and generally putting together a
good, high-quality, well indexed collection never hurts.

The stuff in linux/Documentation generally seems more reference material than
instruction material. (Coverage is spotty and indexing is nonexistent, but
it's way better than nothing.) There's buildable docbook documentation in
the source tarball that in theory could be blasted to HTML and posted online,
and that might be nice to have a standard location for. (If there is one
already, I missed it.)

Try "make htmldocs" (and its cousins, make pdfdocs and make psdocs).

> [3] Necessary patches for each release.
>
> I will do any and maybe all things that folks find useful...
> other suggestions also welcome.

Actually, what I'd like to see is some kind of voting on the stability of
releases. (If you had users who could indicate "I currently use THIS kernel"
and then keep a running tally of where everybody's at...

Not so much for the stable series (modulo 2.4.11) but for the -ac series,
knowing which ones are considered relatively stable would be fun. And
knowing which 2.5 variants are going to at least finish booting before they
eating your filesystem might be good. :)

Possibly you could have a version specific message board. (Grab the
slashcode or something and post a "story" about each new release, then
collect them into topics.) Linux-kernel isn't necessarily the best place for
"comments on 2.5.15-pre-314159", because there's no real version sorting.
We've got 2.5 development, 2.4 development, 2.5-dj, 2.4-ac, the occasional
burp from 2.2, and all sorts of general theoretical development unrelated to
any actual kerenel. (Random traffic for the O(1) scheduler patches, preempt
patches, Keith Owens' new build system, periodic CML2 flamewars...) The
noise level's a bit high to try to follow specific topics of interest...

Being able to thread that out a little better doesn't strike me as a bad
thing at all...

Rob