On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 05:06:42PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Jarod Wilson <ja...@redhat.com> wrote: > > > > But in that case, what if your patch generation script used a filter to > > exclude those binary files? No harm to that target audience, and it would > > actually make them behave better for distro builds. Though that might be > > counter to the goal of making them disappear entirely. :) > > Heh, I'd rather people get the warning that "oops, something is > incomplete". They can still work with the end result, but at least > they got some indication that hey, that patch didn't work wonderfully > well... > > To be honest, I really would like to not do the tar-balls and patches at all. > > But maybe rather than saying "it's only for legacy 'patch' users", I > could just say that it's getting phased out, and say "you have to use > 'git apply' to apply them". > > Then I could just enable "--binary" and "-M", and see what happens.
I like this idea! > I suspect that these days, git is so ubiquitous that it's ok. > > And then in a few years, maybe I can just stop doing patches entirely, > having proved the point that everybody already has git ;) Honestly, the only people that don't have access to git to pull down kernel sources? People who haven't yet got a kernel up and running, who will probably get there via a distro kernel. ;) Side note in favor of tarballs: I know Fedora likes upstream to have tarballs, with checksums provided, so that packages can be verified to contain a legitimate upstream source tarball, rather than a random tarball created by the packager that could have some extraneous bits (possibly malicious) added to them. One can certainly examine and validate a generated tarball too, but it's a fair bit more work than just "does the checksum match?" and not as easily automated. -- Jarod Wilson ja...@redhat.com