[gNewSense-users] Re: gen-kernel

[Danny Clark]

Richard M Stallman wrote:
> Why do we want to start from Debian's version of Linux
> instead of Linux Libre?

We want to start from the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, not the Linux
packages specifically, because Debian has already done the work of
porting, building and packaging much of GNU as well as X, etc. for us
(and Ubuntu has not, as they only focus on the more mainstream
architectures.)

Linux is one of the few parts of gNewSense that is actually built from
sources, and I assume gNewSense/Debian will do the same Linux Libre +
gNewSense people looking at the code that gNewSense/Ubuntu does.

Linux (as we like to point out) is just one part of a GNU/Linux
distribution, so a lot of the effort of the port will be on things other
than Linux; these other parts are what basing on Debian instead of
Ubuntu largely takes care of for us.

> Does it have patches for the MIPS
> that are not in Torvalds' version (which Linux Libre tracks)?
> In that case, would it be feasible to merge those patches into
> Linux Libre?

This will be an interesting conflict as I believe current gNewSense
policy is to stick with the Linux that the distro gives by default, but
with Lemote we will really need bleeding-edge Linux plus random patches;
the random paches bit source .debs handle well, but this will lead to
more manual code review being needed more often, or gNewSense/Debian
Linux (kernel) being less well vetted for freedem than gNewSense/Ubuntu
Linux (kernel), which as previously stated starts with linux-libre but
than goes through a farther code review which results in gNS-specific
code removal sometimes

(although perhaps we should just be better about pushing those changes
upstream to linux-libre - do they ever reject modifying their script to
remove things we find to be non-free?)

-- 
Daniel JB Clark   | Sys Admin, Free Software Foundation
pobox.com/~dclark | http://www.fsf.org/about/staff#danny

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