John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: [...]
> I was puzzled, however, by the fact that the unpacking created the > directory /usr/src/linux instead of /usr/src/kernel-source-x.x.xx. I > thought the latter was correct for Debian. But since I had a kernel > I could compile, I continued. (My earlier unpackings gave me the > kernel-source directories). I don't how the source tree becomes /usr/src/kernel-source-xxx either. The official (Linus) kernels unpack into linux (so you'd unpack them into /usr/src/linux, typically). Somehow Debian repackages the process, but I don't know how. I don't think it matters for the moment. > Trying to patch 2.2.15-1pre from /usr/src gave me an error message > 'can't find file to patch at input line 4. ? wrong -p or --strip option ...' . > I used -p1 with the same result. I put the patch inside /usr/src/linux and > found that '# zcat pre-patch--2.2.15-1.gz' | patch -p1' worked. I don't > understand why this should work. Alan seems to have produced the patches by diffing between two directories linux.vanilla and linux.15p9 (for pre9). So for most of us, a patch from /usr/src won't work (since we won't have a directory called linux.vanilla---nor do we want one). The best option is, as you did, to go into the linux directory, and use -p1 (to ignore the linux.vanilla part of the filenames). > Should be plain sailing now I assumed. No, I cannot apply any > further pre-patches without many errors. The most common one being > 'patching file e.g. 'CREDITS' reversed or previously applied patch > detected!. Assume -R? [n] ' . I continued hitting <enter>, presumably > this accepted the default option offered, but it merely left a large number > of .rej entries. The prepatches are different from the patches between real released versions (like 2.2.12 to 2.2.13): each one includes all the previous changes. Thus, to get from 2.2.14 to 2.2.15-pre15 (or whatever the latest prepatch is), you just need a 2.2.14 source tree and the 2.2.15-pre15 patch.
