>How about the people who (like myself) would much rather download that 10mb
>file once, and use patches the rest of the time? Actually, it sounds like
...
>Drivers: 9mb compressed. I guess most of the stuff is here (I'm using
9 MB compressed? Huh. Whole 2.2.5 bzip2ped is 10.4 MB.
I don't know so much about the rest, but at least drivers should be
separated. This is because they *already* have separated, except for some
stuff. For example Gravis Ultrasound project driver is separate, ALSA is
separate, KGI is separate, my scanner driver (kernel tree has no scanner
support at all afaik, except general scsi) is separate and so on.
Of those drivers in the kernel tree, I need very little. For example, I
don't have any network hardware (except my modem) nor SCSI. I suppose the
same of most of other people.
The basic drivers for each architecture could be in kernel so that the
system could be booted without extra packages (keyboard, display, maybe
mouse if there is common standard), but for rest of the drivers, who
decides which goes into kernel and which does not? Not everything can
possibly put in anyway. Yeah, I know Linus does this. But he shouldn't.
What if now someone wants to get a huge tar file which really does
have all drivers? No problem, someone can prepare a tar file which
contains kernel source tree and all other drivers. This can be
easily compiled and installed with a simple script.
The only problem is that one has to verify that the driver he wants to
download supports the kernel version he is using. Maybe the required kernel
version could be put in the driver tar file name... or at least otherwise
clearly stated.
This subject has popped in before... I don't really remember what the final
result was. Maybe that someone could prepare another version of the kernel
tree which has unneeded drivers and architectures removed.
-- | Tuukka Toivonen <tuukkat@ee.oulu.fi> [PGP public key | Homepage: http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~tuukkat/ available] | Try also finger -l tuukkat@ee.oulu.fi | Studying information engineering at the University of Oulu +-----------------------------------------------------------
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