>
> I was just sitting here staring at acidwarp too long and I decided to
> write to linux-kernel about something has probably been thought of many
> times before.. (but I haven't read anything about it yet):
>
> 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?
Why not just download the patches? Most people have some version of the
kernel source online already. For instance, the Slackware development
utilities come with a copy of whatever kernel that distribution was
designed to be run under (2.0.13?). The patches are undeniably large in
some cases, however if you start out current it isn't much of a problem,
since the bandwidth usage is spread out over weeks as you update to each
version as it comes out.
As for patch rejects, the only time that happens is if you've messed with
something, or something decided to get broken, but it's usually easy to
fix. If someone is running development kernels, they should be able to
handle this. I realize you're talking about all kernels, though. (Still,
the patch reject files are really self-explanatory.)
[deletia]
> 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.
I think they were back in the 1.3.x days, but I honestly don't recall.