Re: Debian Kernels was: 2.6.0test9 Reiserfs boot time "buffer layererror at fs/buffer.c:431"

[Hans Reiser]

Pavel Machek wrote:

> Hi!
>
>  
>
> > > There was a bug in one of the released Debian kernels, and do you think this
> > > hasn't happened with Redhat, SuSe, or Mandrake?  Just because Debian is
> > > completely OSS and maintained mostly by unpaid volunteers, that shouldn't
> > > keep them from having a seperate tree like everyone else.
> > >      
> > Just to avoid a false impression: I am in no way against debian project nor do
> > I say there is anything specifically bad about it. I am generally disliking
> > distros' ideas of having _own_ kernels. Commercial companies like SuSE or Red
> > Hat may find arguments for that which are commercially backed, debian on the
> > other hand can hardly argue commercially. From the community point of view it
> > is just nonsense. It means more work and less useable feedback.
> > Bugs is distro kernels are (always) the sole fault of their respective
> > maintainers because they actively decided _not_ to follow the mainstream and
> > made bogus patches. Why waste the appreciated work of (unpaid) debian
> > volunteers in this area? There are tons of other work left with far more
> > relevance for users than bleeding edge kernel patches...
> >    
>
>
> Debian is distibution; distributions are _expected_ to fix bugs (etc)
> in their packages.
>  
not in their packages, but in their packaging, and to submit bug fixes 
to the maintainers.


> If distribution had all packages unmodified, it would be useless...
>  
not at all.

> So I'd expect all distros to have at least some changes in their
> kernel... the same way I expect distros to have some patches in
> midnight commander etc.
>
> Of course it is good to keep the .diff as small as possible.
> 								Pavel
>  
I just want to say that I would happily do 10 times as much work to keep 
things working for debian, but not using the vanilla kernel is a mistake 
for debian, just as changing, say, xmms without involving the xmms 
maintainer would be a mistake and more likely to cause bugs for users.  
Just because SuSE and RedHat have lots of money doesn't mean that debian 
should ape their mistakes.

--
Hans


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