Defining a standard mechanism for patches

Pascal A. Dupuis (dupuis@lei.ucl.ac.be)
Thu, 17 Dec 1998 12:29:13 +0100 (CET)


While on the subject of kernel patches, someone mentionned ac, arca, vger
sources of patches. He forgot about linux-mama, bigphysarea, devfs, QNX
scheduler, crypto and surely a lot of others ... ;-)

Would it be convenient to define a standard (i.e. official,
supported) mechanism to use those patches, in order to know "this is kernel
2.X.Y, with applied patches so and so" ? It would look like the approach
used in the linux-mama system:
-each patch lives under /usr/src/linux/patches
-each patch add a one-liner .pinfo file under /usr/src/linux/init/patches,
describing the main purpose and the author/maintainer. All those files are
gathered together at compile time, in order to print a list of applied
patches at boot-up
-we would have a /proc/patches entry, containing this list of patches.
This way, it would be possible to obtain the information from a running
kernel.
-each patch should clearly have a status :
-reported to work/working OK / untested / ...
-new feature / bug fix / security fix
-will be included later / experimental / Linus say "nay!"
- ...
This is a new feature (code freeze, I know), but it would help a lot to
know the exact status of a kernel.

Pascal A. Dupuis

-- 
linux : un noyau
windows : des pépins

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