> > The bigger the kernel tree gets, the harder it is to configure,
> > navigate, understand, etc.
>
> Which is harder
>
> 'Bananavision capture card ?'
> type N
>
> or
>
> 'How do I search the web for a foo1500 scsi controller. Has anyone tested
> this driver with 2.2.11. Why doesn't it work with the blah controller I got
> driver from www.somewhere.org. The blah author says its your fault you say
> its his - now what'
>
> and the 'which of the 12 versions of xyz controller driver do I use'
Both are sufficiently hard that 98% of (future, if not current) Linux
users will never make the attempt. Given the choice between finding
and building a new kernel, or finding and building one new driver as a
standalone module, I still think the standalone module is easier.
People who already know where to look to grab the latest kernel
tarball are not the ones who have trouble finding, say, Donald
Becker's web pages, or the linux laptop page, or my PCMCIA pages.
Even without better binary API compatibility, installing most add-on
driver modules would be trivial to automate. Doing the same for a new
kernel is much harder.
I almost always mess things up at least once when I try to configure a
kernel from scratch, without copying an old .config file. Given a raw
kernel source tarball, configuring a kernel equivalent to what Red Hat
ships (with modularized everything, and initrd) is not at all trivial.
-- Dave Hinds
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