Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT optimaltec.com>]

Quoting "David Michael Leo Brown Jr." <dmlb2000 AT excite.com>:

> > If there's an existing config, that seems to be your only option to 
> > allow the
> > spell co build successfully.
> >
> > I can't do this experiment right now, but what would happen if I installed
> > 2.6.10 kernel using linux-new, and then kept using it until 2.6.11 came out?
> > New parameters are guaranteed to emerge between these two major releases, so
> > without doing "make oldconfig" or "make menuconfig" the kernel 
> > woudn't build.
> > Do we agree on this last statement or I am misstating something? If 
> > we agree,
> > than would my only option to make linux-new build again be "cast -r" 
> > or I have
> > any other choices?
>
> make oldconfig would ask questions for all the config variables that 
> it didn't
> have answers for. so the yes '' | make oldconfig would just accept all the
> default values for new features that aren't in the config that it 
> pulled from.

That worked for me just fine in the past.

> > With current spell, I can lazily choose "run oldconfig" and use the same
> > features I used in 2.6.10. If I need new features I would still not 
> > use "cast
> > -r" (I never do it with current linux spell), because it would forget what
> > branch of kernel I prefer (I may not remember which one I selected for a
> > particular machine, so this is important, especially in production). I
> > would do
> > "cast linux" and say "yes" to "configure linux kernel" question. I 
> > would leave
> > the kernel branch intact, and wait until menuconfig shows up. While
> > this is not
> > intuitive, it covers most scenarios for kernel upgrade, and works reliably.
>
> Well I can change it to work this way if people really want, but the current
> way you would do something like this is cast -r linux-new then just ignore
> the main menu don't even bother trying to select an old source tree just save
> and exit then it will bring up which ever config type you gave it.

Do you mean it would remember the setting even if I did "cast -r"? That could
work.

> > I admit that I am not a power user of the linux spell, I almost 
> > never use any
> > patches, always stock kernel source (it may be rc or mm or something 
> > else, but
> > I consider this "stock" code too). Does this mean that linux-new 
> > spell is not
> > for me?
>
> No it means linux-new is completely for you...
> With linux-new you'd be able to run an mm source and a vanilla source on the
> same machine and keep both up-to-date. There is one catch, the linux 
> spell can
> only have one version at a time so it won't be able to autoupdate 
> both source trees (ie sorcery system-update will only be able to 
> update one of them) but
> you can switch the version by selecting one of the old source trees.

That's fine, I never need more than one actually.

The way it looks to me now is that
1) current spell doesn't really handle "sorcery system-update" well and 
the new
one isn't either, so that's a fair trade :-);
2) I'd like to tweak some options (e.g. en/disable a new driver or iptables
module) but keep major settings intact, so I'd like to stay away from 
"cast -r"
as long as I can.

That's my summary.

Sergey.