Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 74056
Kernel documentation ignores packaging system.
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:46:42 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3; Linux) Description of problem: The readme in the Linux kernel source does not tell users how to build a packaged kernel. Likewise, the make menuconfig tool also recommends that users run `make dep' themselves after creating their config file rather than `make rpm' (which would run `make dep' itself). By installing unpackaged applications, users install files to their hard disk which cannot be properly uninstalled, verified, queried, or upgraded using standard LSB mechanisms. As many other applications rely on having a specific version of the kernel installed, they must either be force installed, which further breaks the system. It is true that many other apps author documentation is also unaware of rpm. However, that does not mean this is not a problem, and fixing the kernel documentation is a good place to start, as this is one of the most frequently rebuilt sources on a Linux system, and would thus go a long way towards promoting proper system administration proceedures. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install kernel-source 2a.Read /usr/src/linux(version)/README 2b) Run make menuconfig and notice the message on stdout. 2c) The various other config targets may also exhibit similar behavior. Expected Results: The kernel documentation should contain instructions for building standard Linux packages of the kernel. make menuconfig, and any other config tool, should tell the users to then `make rpm' as their next step. Additional info:
We package the Linux kernel documentation as is. The kernel-source package is meant for code that needs our kernel source tree to build against, not for rebuilding the kernel Rebuilding the kernel is done like every other package (rpm --install something.src.rpm; rpmbuild -ba SPECS/something.spec)
Thanks for your response Alan. This differs from Red Hat's Customization guide, which suggests users use the kernel-source package for building custom kernels. http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/custom-guide/ch-custom-kernel.html Two things: * Should the Customization guide be modifed to reflect the method suggested by Alan above? * If the method used in the customization guide is indeed correct, can the kernel suggest users create a packaged kernel rather than an unpackaged one? * Can this be reopened? Thanks, Mike