I don't agree, and I'll try to explain. I am not a kernel developer (if I'd write a "Hello World" program from scratch, it'd probably segfault :-)), but I have been around for a long time, since 2.1.42 or so. From my experience I would say that if you want to use more up-to-date kernels than whatever comes with your debian or linuxppc or whatever distribution, you are better off with the special PPC trees. The "official" tree is good if you want to get mad at Linus and his Intel-centrism.
"C.M. Connelly" wrote: > > I've been building kernels from the kernel.org sources since, hmm, > 2.2.12, including many of Alan Cox's prereleases, with very few > problems. This is a very short period of kernel development and one with few changes for old hardware. You would see this differently if you had seen the period from 2.2.0 to 2.2.6 or if you had USB hardware. > In contrast, the few times I've bothered with the PPC development > tree sources, I've had lots of problems. The impression I've > gotten is that most changes made to the PPC-only tree are for There is no "PPC-only" tree. These trees contain all the up-to-date versions for other architectures, plus new development for PPC. This new development is there for testing purposes, and when it looks OK, it is sent to Linus for inclusion into his (the "main") tree. Most of the time, Linus accepts these patches, but sometimes he includes weird stuff that has not been tested in the PPC trees, with disastrous results. And sometimes he just loves to break all non-Intel architectures. > supporting newer machines, and probably work fine on those newer > machines, but break on older systems (I have a PowerCenter 132). If anything breaks, you should report this on the linuxppc-dev mailing list, and to the corresponding maintainer. > Having a separate tree for development purposes is a good thing, > and people who want to experiment with new features or unusual > hardware should probably be using that kernel. But it's very Unusual hardware... That would include basically all hardware that runs linuxppc :-) > important that everyone else use the main kernel source, and > report any bugs in the main tree so they can be fixed. If the two Where would you report this? On the linux-kernel mailing list? This is a mainly i386-only list, and any patch you propose for the PPC architecture would have to pass through the maintainers, Cort Dougan and Paul Mackerras, anyway. Chances are that whatever bug you detect in the main kernel has already been found and put into the PPC kernel trees in order to be tested before being sent to Linus. > trees aren't being kept in sync, then we, the users, have a > problem, and we need to encourage the developers to keep things up > to date in the main tree. Which is what they are doing anyway. Just my 0.02\Euro. -- Martin
