Installation report 2 for beta 1

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 07:40:42AM +0800, John Summerfied wrote:

 > I do recall comparing the number of lines of Linux kernel with the 
 > number of lines of RH patches back around RHL 7.3. Are you saying RH has 
 > changed its ways?

Fedora has had the goal of being as close to upstream as possible since
day one.  We still carry some patches, but "extra feature/driver" is something
we try to avoid.  The disaster we had with supporting ipw over the last
few releases is a good example why.

You either pick an old kernel, and stick with it for the lifetime of a release,
or you get the option of rebasing to a newer upstream kernel as/when they
become available. Doing the former means any add-on drivers you carry
won't break, but it does mean you have the nightmare job of backporting
fixes from the later upstream releases, which given the current upstream
rate of ~4-5000 changes per release (bi-monthly, though moves are afoot to
try and increase the release rate), really isn't feasible.

So we rebase to each new point release. The amount of effort involved
is trivial. The daily rediffing that happens in rawhide hits a conflict
that needs resolving once every so often, and is 2-3 minutes work.

There are currently 90 patches applied in todays rawhide kernel.
A bunch of them will never go upstream (exec-shield for eg, though
some bits of it did get merged), a bunch of others have been 
merged in upstream maintainers -git trees, but haven't found their
way to Linus' tree yet.  There are a bunch of other patches that
could go upstream, and that process typically goes..

- make patch for bug in bugzilla
- send patch upstream, and commit to cvs
- when daily rebase fails due to 'already applied patch', drop patch

Most of those are in the second stage, some may need retransmitting.

But on the whole, things are very different from RHL7 days.
looking at the number of lines of patches, Fedora has a lot
less change as what RHL7 did.

RHL7.3  - 210272 lines
rawhide - 43861 lines.

That's still a lot higher than I'd like, but we're getting there.

		Dave