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From: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl>
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Subject: Re: Different kernels for the bindist and boot.flp?
To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith)
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 19:50:50 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: nik@iii.co.uk, mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <199709181150.VAA00568@word.smith.net.au> from "Mike Smith" at Sep 18, 97 09:20:21 pm
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As Mike Smith wrote...
> > > No, it's actually quite hard.  Due to the way the boot floppy works, 
> > > you have to build a custom image with your new kernel, and then hack 
> > > sysinstall to splat a new kernel image down after it's extracted the 
> > > bindist.  You could alternatively specify a different kernel to go in 
> > > the bindist, which is relatively straightforward but slow (you have to 
> > > build a release to do it).
> > 
> > This is why I was thinking about seperating the bin dist into a bin dist and
> > a kernel dist. The new bin dist contains everything non-kernel specific,
> > the kernel dists each contain one kernel with support for a specific set of
> > features, and the kernel config file used to create them.
> 
> This rapidly reduces to supplying the kernel sources and a text editor. 
> The alternative is a million different kernel distributions, which are 
> nothing short of a terror to maintain.

There is already a name for this. It's called 'Linux' ;-)

_     ____________________________________________________________________
 |   / o / /  _  Bulte  email: wilko@yedi.iaf.nl http://www.tcja.nl/~wilko
 |/|/ / / /( (_) Arnhem, The Netherlands - Do, or do not. There is no 'try'
----------------------------------------------------------------------Yoda