On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 01:10:27PM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote: > I do not believe that this patch has caused excessive grief for the > benefits that it brings. In fact, conflicts between the Debian kernel > source and random kernel patches floating around are a fact of life. > > For example, the grsecurity patch has had a history of conflicts with > various patches in the Debian kernel source. Most of those patches that > caused conflicts were in fact essential security fixes. You can review > this for yourself by visiting to the BTS entry for the grsecurity > package.
That has more to do with the fact that grsecurity is an intrusive pile of garbage, splashed pretty much all over the tree (which, incidentally, is a large part of reasons why it is unfit for upstream kernel). For crying out loud, it's a half-megabyte monolitic patch. Even devfs was slightly smaller when it had finally dripped into the tree. If somebody wants to play with it - they'll have to either a) split the damn thing into series of localized chunks and enjoy relatively easy resolution of conflicts with other patches or b) wear "I'm a sadomasochist and proud of it" T-shirt and leave everybody else alone. Look, it's that simple - authors of patch had chosen to be antisocial and kept it a monolit; that makes it a second-class citizen as far as merges are concerned. Less intrusive patches get precedence. End of story.