Re: [Xen-devel] build suggestion

[Christian L. <Chr...@cl...>]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 04:04:28PM -0500, Brian Wolfe wrote:
> That still doesn't fix the issue of the sparse patch replacing files
> that may have been altered by the distro. 8-( As it stands now you have
> to sparse-patch fist, THEN apply any other patches that you want. This
> is an undesireable situation to be in when there are many other things
> to patch. (bug fixes, stadard features specific to this distro, etc).

Ah I see, I've never used a distribution patched kernel.  Won't you
then also need to apply patches which the distribution applies
to files in arch/i386 to the corresponding files in arch/xen?

> IMO replacing files and adding new ones is a bad way of distributing
> changes to a standard software package when a beter way IMHO exists. The
> only dificulty is in that if we had a diff for each tree, then they
> would be large, and splitting the diffs based on what's common, and what
> isn't, is tough. 8-P I wonder if I could make a script that takes the
> individual diffs nd pulls out the unique alterations into their own
> files and leaves a single large common diff....

To reduce size, you want to have diffs for:
- changes we've made to files outside of arch/xen, include/asm-xen
and drivers/xen. (for 2.6 that's 9.9K)
- files in (2.6') arch/xen/i386 and in include/asm-xen/asm-i386,
diff against arch/i386 and include/asm-i386 respectively (254K,
75K gzip'ed, 41K of the uncompressed size is the diff for
arch/i386/Kconfig)

All these will be quite specific to the tree they are supposed to
be applied to.
Everything else is new files which won't have distribution applied
patches and thus it's probably preferable to use sparse files.

If you apply the 2nd diff after copying the files from your
distribution patched kernel, you should be able to pull their
changes to arch/i386 and include/asm-i386 over to arch/xen/i386
and include/asm-xen/asm-i386 (unless they conflict).

    christian