> > No, but it renders bug reports about them pretty much useless on _this_
> > _list_. Bug reports for the official Linus trees and maybe Alan's tree are
>
> Why ? I've got Red Hat and SuSE trees here for these specific reasons
And Debian, Mandrake, Stampede, OpenLinux, ..?
I do see your point. I guess it's a question of where to draw the line. You
wouldn't (presumably) want to see bug reports for MkLinux, or uClinux, or
Linux 1.1.x here? Obviously those are a long way away in the `family tree'
now, whereas vendor's kernels are pretty close.
Incidentally, were you aware of the dispute between the XEmacs developers and
the debian package maintainers? Not directly comparable, but a similar sort
of thing.
> And 50% of messages get mangled or lost or passed down a chain of chinese
> whispers.
Yes, I can believe that.
> A _lot_ of people run vendor kernels. All the major vendor kernels are
> useful debugging points. All of them ship handy System.map files too.
But there are a large number of vendors, and some doubtless diverge from Linus'
tree a lot more than others.
When I see oops reports or other problems posted here, if I think it looks like
something I might have half a clue about, I tend to try and pick it apart. I
can easily imagine situations where
i) you* look at the ksymoops disassembly, but can't find similar code
in the function named in the trace; okay, not a big problem.
ii) you spend a long time trying to reproduce the problem, only to
find out later (perhaps a lot later) that it was related to a
vendor specific patch.
(* you == anyone, not _you_ specifically ;)
> > It's derived from the code that Linus makes available and has dubbed 'Linux',
> > yes. Can you imagine 'phoning up a car manufacturer and complaining about
> > some problem with the engine, and then adding "of course, I've customised it
> > myself quite extensively.."?
>
> Since when has this been a manufacturers list ?
Err.. I may have misunderstood you here: Linus 'manufactures' a kernel, surely?
> The fact I work for Red Hat, and the fact I'm working on 2.2.11 stuff
> are two unrelated items as when I looked after 2.0.3x
Yes, I understand that.
I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that when the RH kernel package maintainers and
tech support guys have significant bug reports, they throw them your way; if
so, I imagine this improves the chances of getting bugs in both the RH and
the mainstream kernels fixed. It wasn't a sinister suggestion :)
Working back to the original post, do we want chat about whether people
should use this or that kernel rpm, and where they can find them on the RH
site, on this list?
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