Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Is kernel autoconfig possible? | From | Oystein Viggen <> | Date | 23 Jul 1999 20:49:43 +0200 |
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Bill Ward wrote:
> What this is for (maybe I can shed a little light on what I'm > thinking...) is: say I have a novice user distro. Say they need/want a > kernel upgrade (let's not worry about why or how they need/want it). > Most novice users won't be able to do a kernel upgrade themselves, so I > want to do something where the kernel can be auto-configured, then > installed, w/o the user having to do anything more than just tell it to > do it. I'll explain it in more detail if you'd like in a later post. >
I am no authority on this, but it seems to me that such a thing should be handled by the people who make the distros. It shold be possible for them to create an "upgrade to kernel 2.4.1"-script that first looks at how your computer is configured right now, configures the 2.4-kernel accordingly and then probes for any previously unsupported hardware that might be inside your box.
This would not be too bad for novices and my mom, but I believe that people that do not even know what's inside their own computer, should not upgrade their kernel manually in the first place. Not more manually than a 'rpm -ivh kernel-2.4.1-7.i386.rpm' or similar, anyway.
People who can not figure out how to configure their kernel, should probably wait for RedHat 6.3 or Debian 2.5 or something, so that they could make a clean upgrade. Surely a lot of other packages would have to be upgraded if you move from 2.2 to 2.4 just like from 2.0 to 2.2.
I would at least truly hate for such a probe-script to become part of the mainstream kernel, and thereby bloat the tarball for the distro even more. That one is big enough as it is, and will be bigger as more features and drivers are added, even without such an upgrade-script.
(BTW: if you can do without the hardware-probe, we already have 'make oldconfig')
Oystein -- If it ain't broke, don't break it.
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