kernel source code

[Iago Rubio]

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 10:42 +0000, not disclosed wrote:
> What exactly is the problem with including kernel-sourcecode?
> 
> It makes it easy to take someone else's driver and compile it against your 
> source, it makes it easy to nobble the source and recompile - I have spent 
> the last hour trying to install the source from
> the src rpm following the instructions in 
> http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc3/x86/
> and I still don't have the source code so I still can't compile my drivers.  

Did you looked at /usr/src/redhat/BUILD ?

>   I can't be arsed to repeat
> this 20 times when I shift from fc2 in my lab - with the kernel-sourcecode 
> package I would "yum install kernel-sourcecode" and be done.

Please, read the *whole* instructions in the release  notes.

> Removing the kernel-sourcecode is a retrograde step that goes against the 
> principle of packaging
> stuff up - you are forcing the end user to learn a lot of largely useless, 
> arbitrary code rubbish in order to achieve their task.

No, users that rebuilds their rpm packages know exactly how to manage
source rpms.

Your words are a prove, that a separate kernel source package just
developed in users a bogus idea of how to manage source packages on rpm
based distros.

You've got the binaries in the rpm and the sources in the src.rpm, for
all packages. Why the kernel sources should be an exception ?

>   The annoying thing 
> is that it doesn't seem to be saving anyone anything. The idea that it 
> causes harm by duplicating things that are available in the source is daft - 
> if you followed this to its conclusion then you would stop distributingmost 
> binaries.

This is complately pointless.

To make a symlink from /usr/src/linux
to /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel*/linux* to match your previous build
environment is not a hard task, is it ?

ITOH in the release notes and in Warren's repply to your mail, you can
read there's *no need* of kernel source code to build third party
drivers - in most cases. I have no kernel source code, and built the
nvidia driver not once, but one time for each kernel upgrade.

Is this so difficult to understand ?

I was painfull to download the whole kernel source code, and build it,
just to get a sane environment to build the nvidia driver. 

Now to build third party drivers is much easier for me.
-- 
Iago Rubio