[arch-general] signoff kernel26-2.6.24.3-6

[Jan de Groot]

> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: arch-general-bounces at archlinux.org [mailto:arch-general-
> bounces at archlinux.org] Namens Roman Kyrylych
> Verzonden: dinsdag 25 maart 2008 9:48
> Aan: General Discusson about Arch Linux
> Onderwerp: Re: [arch-general] signoff kernel26-2.6.24.3-6
> 
> 
> >  But when you have a kernel26 PKGBUILD
> >  that's 320 lines long, that simplicity is gone.
> 
> It's fun that the kernel is the most often questioned part, and not,
> say, xorg-server which have tons of patches too, but I haven't heard
> complaints about it.
> 

It's fun to see that from the mess that makes up 320 lines of PKGBUILD, almost half of it is copying of headerfiles to /usr/src. A package containing lots of lines doesn't mean it's a bad package, as long as they're documented.
Since Tobias took over kernel26 maintenance and switched it to mkinitrd/initcpio/initramfs/whatever, I stopped compiling my own kernels, as the standard kernel contains everything I need. If there are objections against a kernel that works and includes support for as much as possible things, my opinion is to remove everything from the kernel, supply a minimal kernel with all default things not marked as experimental enabled and let each and every user build his own kernel. How funny will that be?

As for xorg-server: it's funny you're brining that one up. One week ago, I looked through the patches applied by us and other distributions. Many of the included patches do stuff we don't support or use in arch, so they got removed. Why would we fix Xprint using 6 patches and run --disable-xprint in the configure step, why would we fix Xorg to run with an X86 emulator, etc. I was sick of all these patches in xorg-server. I removed tonnes of patches from the PKGBUILD, cleaned it up and put the left-over combined patchset in a tarball and uploaded it to FTP. My opinion is that patching is good, but please take a look for every patch if they're really needed. Just including random patches because other distributions include them too is bad.
I don't think our xorg-server maintainer should take all blame here: upstream quality of xorg-server is very very very bad. There's no maintenance on the server-1.4 branch, and any maintenance done there is broken if you don't add a shitload of extra patches.