2.6.27.1, and .debs by Ali (was: Linux-libre login)

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Oct 16, 2008, "Ali Gunduz" <gndz.ali at gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess you already know it but 2.6.27.1 is released.

Yep, thanks, I just pushed out a tarball, and there's a Freed-ora
devel build underway.


> BTW, I frequently see rpm updates in the mailing list, much more
> frequently than I see source pack releases. What is the process about
> rpm? Is it because you make separate rpm's for fedora and blag? Or do
> you implement the between-release git snapshots to rpm's?

It's more of a consequence of the way Fedora does kernel rpms than
anything else.

Say, Fedora always starts from the pristine 2.6.M tarball, rather than
from any patchlevel.  It then applies the patch-* patches, and finally
local patches, all part of the build process.  So the tarballs don't
change much.  In fact, I don't use 2.6.M.N tarballs at all.

Adn then, yes, Fedora devel pretty much tracks daily git snapshots,
and I try to run a Freed-ora linux-libre build for every Fedora linux
build.

The idea of tracking Freed-ora builds, rather than upstream, is to
minimize the divergence between the Fedora non-Free kernels and the
Linux-libre ones.  So, any fixes and improvements that go into Fedora
will be readily available in our Free builds, as long as they don't
bring in non-Free stuff, of course.  It also spares me from *having*
to deal with .config issues, general breakage, etc: it's all dealt
with upstream.

If you're going to tackle building .debs for say Freed-ebian,
Uhurubuntu, etc (thanks!), I suggest taking a similar approach,
offering people kernels that match as closely as possible those in
their "upstream" distro, even if you *also* offer builds based on the
latest upstream kernel releases.

I hope this clears it up.  Let me know if you'd like more details, and
welcome aboard.


BTW, I listed your web page at http://fsfla.org/se-libre/linux-libre,
along with a few other distros and packages that already adopted
Linux-libre.  If people know of others, please let us know.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}