Kernels present special difficulties. [LWN.net]

Kernels present special difficulties.

Posted Jan 26, 2006 14:33 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (✭ supporter ✭, #28)
In reply to: Fedora Legacy has major problems by JoeBuck
Parent article: Slowing down Fedora Core

I agree that there are problems with Legacy, and that kernel updates are the most troublesome issue. The biggest difficulty with your proposal is, as I'm sure Dave Jones will confirm, that changes in the kernel (and latent bugs in some userspace components) keep breaking user-space components such as udev, libselinux, alsa, etc., so it is not easy or sufficient to, say, upgrade everyone to 2.6.15.1. One can't just drop the kernel SRPM for the currently supported release into the build system for the various older releases without ifdefs sprinkled throughout the kernel spec file and/or other package updates. Since the kernel and the userspace components have separate maintainers, coordinating an update is a bit of a problem.

The alternative is to attempt to cherrypick and backport fixes. That can be a lot of work -- work that detracts from improving the current, supported releases.

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