Fedora Core 5 carries similar amount of patches to Dapper

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 07:13 +0100, James Laver wrote:
> See, it's not really canonical's job. The kernel should generally be
> left to the maintainers as much as possible. It's bad enough with
> redhat messing about submitting thousands of patches, while it's good
> that they're fixing bugs, it's harder to keep track of everything,
> especially when they just patch their own sources and don't submit
> them for inclusion in the kernel.

Can you point to some sites and post some stats showing that is what Red
Hat do? I'm an Ubuntu user but I do use Fedora elsewhere and I have a
passing interest in their kernels. Last time I checked, outside Xen the
Fedora kernels had less patches against mainline than the Ubuntu kernels
did.

FC5's kernel-2.6.16-1.2133_FC5.src.rpm has 5.4M of non-Xen patches and
alters around 921 files (I've just been told that 600KB of that is GFS2
and that is going to be pushed mainline soon). The new Xen source is 17M
or around 751 new files by itself and I'm fairly certain Red Hat want
Xen in the mainstream kernel - it's simply that it needs work on it it
until it can in. So that's 22.4M or around 1672 altered files of
difference against mainline but less without Xen.

Ubuntu Dapper's linux-source-2.6.15_2.6.15-23.39_all.deb seems to have
21M and alters around 6121 files but doesn't carry Xen (but does carry
out of tree drivers that Fedora doesn't).

Files altered were counted using a crude "grep diff | wc -l" or in the
xen case a find | wc -l.

Why did I break Xen out on the Fedora side? Well due to the way their
kernel RPM is built they hold all the patches they use with names in
their source RPM which makes it easier to see what they are doing. On
the ubuntu side I wound up downloading mainline kernel source and
diffing that against the prepatched Ubuntu one. Having said that I
believe most people use git these days so it would be great if someone
would do deeper analysis of all the distros' git trees.

I don't think Red Hat's Fedora does carry thousands of patches if you
leave Xen aside and I don't see anything saying that Red Hat is anti
pushing its stuff upstream. This view seems to be backed up by a Red Hat
kernel hacker's post here:
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/30664.html

-- 
Sitsofe | http://sucs.org/~sits/