On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 01:08:34AM -0600, D. Michael McFarland wrote:
> It seems this file is not contained in linux-source-*. I expect it
> would be installed along with linux-image-*, and to be in the source
> package for linux-image-*; I haven't downloaded that (yet) because it
> appears to contain a copy of the kernel sources.
I expect you are correct and that that source package for the
linux-image-* packages contains the source copy. Actually I'd be
interested in seeing statistics for how many people fetch linux-image-*
sources, rather than grab kernel-source-* packages[1].
> (It is this
> inclusion of the kernel sources that I think is new behavior.) It
> seems foolish to download nearly 50 MB of source I already have just
> to get a small config file. I now suspect the intent is that someone
> wanting to build from source with the Debian config *should* install
> the source package for linux-image-* (rather than linux-source-*), but
> if so, this could be better documented.
That is the intent: but it sort-of violates the rule of least suprise if
you are familiar with the "standard debian way" of building sources for
other packages. The kernel packages have a long history of doing things
differently.
Back when Herbert Xu orphaned the packages, someone made a valiant
effort to package the kernel using the traditional means, but I don't
remember what happened to it.
Redhat puts the configs used in the srpm under ./configs ; perhaps
putting the debian config file in a seperate package (kernel-config-*)
would be a good idea. Is there a wishlist bug open to this effect? If
not, would you be interested in filing one?
[1] I've been bitten by the non-standard behaviour of the kernel
packages, too: namely, the fact there's no explicit relationship
between the kernel-source and kernel-image packages, so dsafilter
won't be able to tell you if your running binary kernel is
vulnerable to a DSA that comes out on the source packages.
--
Jon Dowland
http://alcopop.org/
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