No need to get defensive, Eric.
If make autoprobe is to become useful to an aunt tillie, it's something the
distribution is going to have to provide a wrapper for, which strikes me as
unlikely in the short term. (QA issues: there's 8 zillion oddball hardware
combos out there, and autodetect is guaranteed to either miss something or
configure something wrong on at least some of them. It'll need rather a lot
of shakedown. More than a year in mainstream.)
As for aunt tillie moving from red hat's kernel to linus's most recent
kernel, is that advisable? Vendors provide outside patches long before linus
does (yes, Linus is more conservative than the distributions are). And
sometimes you get brown paper bag releases (2.4.11-dontuse). Even the
non-brown-paper-bag ones tend to have hardware combinations that won't build
due to easily patchable compilation errors, which aunt tillie ain't up to.
A vendor that provides faster updates than Red Hat (like Kevin's Red Hat Uber
Distribution) is a market opportunity. But a tool is not the same thing as a
service. It just makes providing the service easier.
Make autoconfigure expands the pool of people who can build kernels, but it's
not going to saturate the populace to the point where everybody immediately
SHOULD. Not even close. Over time, the pool will grow. But aiming for Aunt
Tillie in the short term is probably overreaching.
Rob
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/