>But for some people with disk space shhortage (like me), the kernel
>tarball size is not as important as the size of the untarred tree.
>
>I have a wish (for 2.3, I guess) which could make life a lot easier
>for many:
>
>** Make it possible to delete unneeded parts of the tree.
It is. I have done it several times. Just rm -rf all of the
arches that you don't use. Also, rm -rf any other subdirs to
which you know you won't enable any features. For example, no
SCSI, rm -rf the scsi dir. Works for me...
>If I could rm -rf all arches I don't have, delete drivers for
>all cards i don't have or plan to buy, and still the kernel builds,
>then most of my problems are gone.
As above, it does that now for me, and I'm using official
tarballs.
>It would be a really cool feature if make *config could check for
>the files needed for an option, and mark, e.g., the appletalk protocol
>unavailable, if one of the necessary files is missing. But that
>wouldn't be necessary.
I think that due to the kernel's modularity right now, the end
user doesn't have much of a need for recompiling a kernel, nor
should they. More technical users do though, and also
businesses, and other special purpose machines/users may want to
recompile the kernel too. This comes with some requirements, one
of which is disk space. In order to untar the kernel so that you
can remove the stuff that you don't want, you need the space to
untar it allready. If you can do that, then you can allready
remove unnecessary parts.
Someone has allready created scripts which allow you to build a
kernel from ALLREADY compressed sources by manually uncompressing
one at a time. It was a while back I saw it though, so you might
need to hunt it down. Also, it came with a compilation speed
penalty that was quite drastic.
>But if a kernel build would not stumble over missing directories
>one could remove all unnecessary files and save lots of space.
One could find that out by trying it first. ;o) Works here.
-- Mike A. Harris Linux advocate GNU advocate Computer Consultant Open Source advocateNews for nerds, stuff that matters: http://slashdot.org
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