On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:23:49 -0500 Statux wrote: > The old way of doing things was to make the following two symlinks: > > /usr/include/linux -> /usr/src/linux/include/linux > /usr/include/asm -> /usr/src/linux/include/asm > > Then the second would be linked to the correct set of asm headers for > your architecture, etc, inside the linux kernel source tree. > > Somewhere along the lines, the symlinking idea became deprecated in > favor of using a hard set of header files. I forget why this came to > be but I agree that at some point, a newer kernel must render some > portion of an old set of headers outdated. I think the linux-headers > package is intended to be kept as up to date as possible to avoid > interface changes/incompatibilities. Why it's not kept even and why > the redundancy? Good questions. > > I would figure that if you wanted to manually maintain a hard set of > headers and keep them installed in the correct places, you're free to > do so but the linux-headers package has been properly maintained from > my experience. > > My $0.02.
Interesting. At the moment emerge is updating my linux-headers from 2.6.17-r1 to 2.6.17-r2. The first step is downloading linux-2.6.17.tar.bz2 which, at 41MB, seems more like a complete kernel source tree than just the headers. Overkill, eh? It's interesting to compare the keywords of Linux-headers-2.6.19.ebuild, i.e. "-*", to gentoo-sources-2.6.19-r1 which has "~amd64 ~ppc ~ppc64 ~sparc ~x86". If I'm interpreting these correction, gentoo-sources is available but unstable while the headers (a subset of the source) is completely masked out. I wonder why that would be??? -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
