Compression formats for kernel.org

I mean, sure, if you're using some out-of-tree thingy you got yourself, then obviously you're expected to be able to patch/compile/build your own kernel... but if it came from the distro, then *they* are the ones who should be interacting with upstream to pass on bug reports (although things might be interesting if there are bugs that only the end user can reproduce: in that situation I'd expect a three-way, with upstream providing diagnostic patches, the distro building them for the poor damn user or providing a script to do so, and the user running them and reporting the results. Maybe this is too much wild-eyed dreaming, but the alternative is that bugs in the manifold out-of-tree patches that some distros include will never be fixed unless upstream happens to have just the right hardware to reproduce them.)