On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 09:32:31PM +0100, Karl Hammar wrote:
> Adam Borowski:
> > On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 08:15:39PM +0100, karl@??? wrote:
> > > download your kernel from your favourite site, e.g.
> > > ftp:ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/kernels/
> >
> > Boo! Do you live in 20th century? It's a crime to not use git, especially
> > when patches are involved. Even if they're not, you save time unpacking /
> > downloading updates / switching to other releases.
> >
> > git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
>
> Do you see any difference between the git repo and the tar file ?
>
> $ du -s linux-2.6
> 3009716 linux-2.6

You want du -s .git only, as you're counting both packed and unpacked.

> $ ls -l /Net/ftp/ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/kernels/v4.x/linux-4.0.tar.xz
> -rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 82313052 Apr 13 2015 /Net/ftp/ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/kernels/v4.x/linux-4.0.tar.xz
>
> So for someone who has not compiled the kernel from source, I don't
> start with the git clone, especially since I don't know anything about
> their network connection. You might not believe it, but there are still
> people out there with (plain old telefon system) modems.

Such people can specify --depth to make a shallow clone with no history.

But really, I don't see anyone who's capable of compiling their own kernel
use an acoustic modem today.

And unlike tarballs, you clone from git once, then pull only commits you
don't have yet, so in the long run you save bandwidth.

> > > make
> > > make install
> > > make modules_install
> >
> > This won't let you uninstall cleanly, or deploy to other machines.
>
> That lets me deploy to machines without apt or dpkg.

This mailing list happens to be for a distribution where both apt and dpkg
are Essential:yes packages. I'd expect people here to be more likely to
have FreeBSD/whatever machines than to use non-deb Linux.

> I don't uninstall kernels that ofthen so I don't mind the manual way.

So you don't do security upgrades?

I still do have some machines from before I started to just slap a few GB
for / instead of mucking with separate /boot, kernel upgrades there are a
pain as every distribution kernel is more than 100MB unpacked. You do need
to prune these quickly.

> > > ch. bootloader to load your kernal
> >
> > make-kpkg will handle grub/lilo config automatically.
>
> I don't want that automation so I do:
>
> # cat /etc/kernel-img.conf
> do_symlinks = no
> do_bootloader = no
> silent_modules = yes
> warn_initrd = no

Why not? If your use case is not handled by kernel-package and friends,
please submit a bug report so it can be available by everyone. Having to do
such things by hand goes against the idea of a distribution. Any moment
spent on micromanaging rather than automating is wasted.

I understand special handling of bootloaders on embedded, but on a regular
server or desktop? That's reinventing the wheel.

--
A tit a day keeps the vet away.