What will it take to get a 2.6.27 kernel in RH8 ?

[Chris Snook]

Linuxguy123 wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 07:28 -0800, Antonio Olivares wrote:
>> In Red Hat 8?
>> IT would depend on how long it would take to compile probably about 45
>> min to 1 1/2 hours.
> 
> I meant F8.
> 
>> Or do you mean for Fedora 8?
>>
>> It might not get released yet since Fedora 8 is reaching EOL
> 
> But has it reached EOL ?  No.  So why isn't a 2.6.27 kernel in the F8
> repository ?  The F8 mandate says it will provide support to the last 2
> releases.   Has F10 been released yet ?  Nope.  Has 2.6.27 been
> available for about 2 weeks ?  Yep. 
> 
> So why haven't we seen it in the F8 repo ?

Because we don't automatically rebase packages just because there's a new 
upstream release.  Most packages never get rebased in the entire life of the 
release.  For packages that don't have a lot of dependencies or complex 
interactions with the rest of the system, it's fairly easy to rebase on a new 
upstream release when there's a patch that people care about.  Rebasing the 
kernel is an extremely arduous process that we do from time to time when there's 
a great benefit to a very large number of people.

Right now, we're in the middle of this arduous process for F9, which currently 
has a 2.6.27 kernel in updates-testing.  Once that is complete, we might rebase 
F8 if there's a critical bug that can't be fixed with a simple backport, or if 
the maintainers believe that keeping the F8 kernel in sync with F9 will make 
maintenance simpler.

If you don't like it, install newer RPMs manually, or use the rawhide repo, or 
compile from source.  We're not stopping you, but we're not going to risk 
breaking thousands of other people's systems just to make it easier for you to 
risk breaking yours.

-- Chris