I've had close to 12 years doing system level work with Unix
systems. I've written several device drivers, thread packages,
fundamentally rewritten the entire notion of scheduling in Mach,
administered networks of 100's of workstations, run and programmed big
parallel systems, and so forth.
Last week, to get my kernel from 2.1.106 to 2.1.110, I downloaded the
relevant 4 patch files, and proceeded to apply them. Now, I don't
claim to be a wizard with patch(1), but its not exactly a new tool
to me.
What happened ? It completely destroyed my kernel tree. I don't know
why - perhaps the existence of a symlink as the top of my kernel tree
(linux -> linux-2.1.1.06), perhaps some missing options to patch. I
ended up with every *new* file since 2.1.106 present in
/usr/src/linux. I considered backing out the patches with patch -R,
and then realized that this wouldn't necessarily work correctly
either.
So, I got on the line, and sucked down 2.1.110. It took about
6.5hrs. It sucked, but what was the alternative ? I'm sure there was
one, and in fact, I'd love to understand what happened. But consider
this situation for someone who is a little newer to this stuff than me.
--pbd
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