building a 2.6 kernel

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
>>>>    to the previous post re: building a kernel, the most important
>>>> information to remember is to move the kernel source out from under
>>>> that silly /usr/src/linux directory and (if you have the room) to
>>>> somewhere under your home directory.
>>>
>>> Why?
>>> This strikes me as completely unnecessary.
>
>> simply because there's little reason for any regular user to be doing
>> work anywhere under the /usr directory.  it goes back to my point
>> about being able to mount /usr readonly, if you can make that work.
>
> You said originally it was "the most important thing to remember"
> when compiling the kernel.

gawd almighty, are you always this humorless?  it's called 
"hyperbole".  http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hyperbole

> Now you appear to be saying it is a good idea if you belong to the 
> vanishingly small number of people who mount /usr read-only.

i also said that it was a useful feature so that one did not need 
access to the root password or any administrative privilege to just 
hack around and configure and build kernels, with the exception of 
having to install it at the end.  and why is that useful?

for one, it means all the action happens under /home most of the time, 
and if you're really having fun with various versions of the kernel, 
you can dump all kinds of junk in there, and if you fill up /home, 
well, no big deal.  you're probably not going to hurt anything except
yourself.

if you insist on using /usr, you take a chance on filling that up if 
you're not careful and ... i don't know ... maybe something bad 
happens.  more generally, if you insist on messing with kernels as 
root, you just *know* that, eventually, you're going to do something 
silly with that root privilege.  we've all done it.  well, ok, maybe 
alexander dalloz hasn't.  but the rest of us have. :-)

if you think about it, there's precious little damage you can do if 
you want to test building and running a new kernel.  if you make a 
total mess of the configure, chances are the worst that will happen is 
that the new kernel will choke and die at boot time, and you just hop 
back to the old kernel and try again.  no harm, no foul.

you hang out as root on a regular basis -- you'll eventually have an 
oops.

> In my view it is about the 99th most important thing to remember.

cool.  and the other 98 are?  oh, wait ... i'll bet that was 
hyperbole.

rday