[OpenWrt-Devel] Proposal for managing the kernel patches.

[Ben Greear]

I just had a good discussion with jow about this on irc, thought I'd put
my ideas in email form in case others are interested.

In my opinion, it is difficult to develop against the current model of local
kernel patches and backports patches.  So, I am thinking something like this
might be a better approach.

Fork the kernel that we want to use for a base (4.19, for instance).  Apply the
existing patches one at a time to this tree.  Push this tree to github.  Auto-create
tarballs as needed, put them somewhere openwrt can download them.

Now, openwrt can select a kernel to use, which is one of these tarballs during
compile time.

It should be easy to select different kernels with a small makefile tweak (and no need
to deal with local patches conflicting).  And, we can do 'stable' backport patches for
older kernels like upstream does.

In addition, the openwrt kernel can be easily compiled for and installed on a desktop OS which might
make debugging easier.


When it is time to start developing on a new kernel, clone a new one, use 'git am'
to create the old patch-set, and then apply it on the new kernel.  Push that tree
upstream as a new github repo  (so we can easily have a 4.19 kernel as well as 4.14, etc).


I'd also like to somehow cram backports into this same tree, but not sure how reasonable
that is...maybe not worth the effort.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com


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