> Graham Mitchell wrote:
> I heartily encourage you to download and apply kernel patches instead
> of downloading 6mb files. There's a reason why Linus makes them
> available and it has very little to do with his health.
> It might be a good idea to make available only every tenth or fifth
> complete snapshot of the kernel. It saves space on the ftp sites and
> it encourages people to learn how to patch their kernels.
I've recently gone through the exercise of downloading both the patches
and the tarballs, all the way back to 1.0.0. I did this to see if I could
rely on one or the other, and found that I can't. There have been many
discrepancies over that time. In resolving these, I found that sometimes
the patch was correct, other times the tarball was right, and occasionally
neither. The great bulk of these differences are due to patch not
deleting empty directories, or a 'make distclean' was not done before
generating a tarball. Other annoyances have been missing end-of-lines,
spurrious binary data, etc.
Either intentionally or not, this aspect of the kernel appears to have
been worked on as the latest kernels, say from 1.3.7x on or so, have been
quite clean, though not quite perfect yet.
Marc.
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