How not to sell embedded Linux

How not to sell embedded Linux

your editor cannot even begin to grasp the thought process which turns a 13-line security patch into 800,000 lines of code

I think the 'logic' for that probably goes like this:

• You fork off a nice stable copy of (say) 2.6.n and use it happily for a few months.
• A security patch comes along, but the original patch is only made available for current(ish) kernels, say 2.6.n+10
• To apply the patch you first have to apply the 800,000 lines of diffs to take you from 2.6.n to 2.6.n+10

Any developer that worth his salary can see the context of the security patch modifications
and apply it to the old codebase (if the old one is still affected).

What if the original bug is fixable in version 2.6.n+10 because of the infrastructure that
created 800,000 lines of code added dispersed across version 2.6.n+5, 2.6.n+7 and 2.6.n+10?  I
admit that this is a rather hypothetical situation, though.