FLAME____ Why is the kernel source not included

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 15 October 2004 11:30, Paul Howarth wrote:
>John Hodrien wrote:
>> On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, Tom Yates wrote:
>>> i'm sorry if this is a really dim question, but in what sense is
>>> the kernel source not available?  i have the kernel-source
>>> package installed, and it's stuck about a quarter of a gig of
>>> files under /usr/src/linux-2.6.5-1.358. they look a lot like the
>>> source of such kernels as i've built recently.
>>>
>>> am i completely missing some important point?  is this not the
>>> kernel source?
>>
>> No, AFAIK you're missing nothing.  The kernel source is provided,
>> and he's just having a big rant about nothing.
>>
>> Dim questions are usually the ones that are worth asking...
>
>Perhaps he's referring to the upcoming FC3, which will not be
> shipping with a kernel-sourcecode RPM (though the kernel source
> will still be available in the kernel src.rpm of course, albeit not
> in /usr/src/linux-*)?
>
>As Jakob mentioned earlier, properly-written modules should be built
> against the headers in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build rather than
> /usr/src; it may well be that lots of module providers don't
> currently do this despite the fact that it's been the standard way
> of doing things for some time time now, but if the module writers
> can't keep up with the build system, they're hardly likely to be
> able to keep up with changes in the underlying kernel either.
>
>Paul.

There is one very noticeable fly in that bowl of soup Paul, and thats 
the situation where a quasi experienced user is building the next 
generation kernel, and his script dutifully cd's all over the src 
dir, doing make clean && make && make installs for the 3rd party 
stuff (like we used to do for alsa, lm_sensors etc) but on the reboot 
to the new kernel, none of the stuff is there, so you have to rerun 
the whole build script again, and reboot again in order to get those 
modules in a state thats loadable by the kernel actually running.  
They are all built against the older version thats running at the 
time the first pass was done.

I agree, building against /usr/src/linux can lead to all sorts of 
oddities when the 'linux' link may be replaced at any time including 
in the middle of a compile.  But the above method also has its warts.  
Unforch, I don't have a 'better idea' just the squawk. :)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.