> What this is for (maybe I can shed a little light on what I'm
> thinking...) is: say I have a novice user distro. Say they need/want a
> kernel upgrade (let's not worry about why or how they need/want it).
> Most novice users won't be able to do a kernel upgrade themselves, so I
> want to do something where the kernel can be auto-configured, then
> installed, w/o the user having to do anything more than just tell it to
> do it. I'll explain it in more detail if you'd like in a later post.
>
I am no authority on this, but it seems to me that such a thing should
be handled by the people who make the distros. It shold be possible
for them to create an "upgrade to kernel 2.4.1"-script that first
looks at how your computer is configured right now, configures the
2.4-kernel accordingly and then probes for any previously unsupported
hardware that might be inside your box.
This would not be too bad for novices and my mom, but I believe that
people that do not even know what's inside their own computer, should
not upgrade their kernel manually in the first place. Not more
manually than a 'rpm -ivh kernel-2.4.1-7.i386.rpm' or similar, anyway.
People who can not figure out how to configure their kernel, should
probably wait for RedHat 6.3 or Debian 2.5 or something, so that they
could make a clean upgrade. Surely a lot of other packages would have
to be upgraded if you move from 2.2 to 2.4 just like from 2.0 to 2.2.
I would at least truly hate for such a probe-script to become part of
the mainstream kernel, and thereby bloat the tarball for the distro
even more. That one is big enough as it is, and will be bigger as more
features and drivers are added, even without such an upgrade-script.
(BTW: if you can do without the hardware-probe, we already have
'make oldconfig')
Oystein
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