Would there be some clean way to allow a linux user to configure his/her
kernel BEFORE downloading the >6 meg tar, and then have some sort of
automatic script download only the parts of the kernel that are needed to
build that system?
This would help tremendously with the great amount of people who have a
limited amount of bandwidth/space but still want to use recent linux
kernels... In fact, alot of people are probably downloading 90% code that
they don't use in their kernel.. Im not saying the amount of features the
kernel supports is a bad thing (its actually the best thing about linux),
its just that not everyone needs to download the entire kernel.
Of course, this might be hard to implement, and the current kernel
distribution sites would have to provide some way to retrieve only parts
of the current kernels, but I think it would be worth it in the end. On
top of the space/time decrease required to get new kernels, it might also
simplify the organization of the kernel if a user could see that a certain
part of it was recently changed, and choose to only update that part of
the kernel.. It might help to track bugs down easier, and eventually maybe
make Linus's job of releasing an entirely new kernel for every set of
changes no longer necessary. Maybe he could even delegate certain parts
of the packages to be directly maintained by other people (instead of him
having to patch and tar up everything all the time).
Anyhow, just some ideas, they might have been proposed and bashed down a
long time ago, but I haven't seen any mention of this yet in the months
that I have been reading the mailing list.
-Vermont Rutherfoord
Mongoloid Programmer tier #2
vermont@gate.net
PD
Maybe Ive just been blind and something like this already exists?
PPD
Does BSD do something like this?