aragon said:
Can we turn this into something productive and create a monolithic, rolling patch set that saves everyone from having to pick out the individual bits from the mailing lists and commit logs?
A patch set will make life much easier. Apply to 8.2-RELEASE source tree and recompile kernel - simple. In cases where userland bits need to be recompiled too, perhaps those can be documented similarly to how security advisories document them.
First we need to know what useful changes we can 'patch back' to RELEASE, for example if I havent seen that blog post, I would not know that there were such important changes, what to track, commits (where to check them before I fire up google)?
Second, we have one directory with 'plain/stock' 8.2-RELEASE built, next we attach needed patches and build 8.2-RELEASE in another directory, as 8.2.1-RELEASE, we do
diff -r -q 8.2-RELEASE 8.2.1-RELEASE and
tar up the difference and put on
http as a patch, manual download can be good way for a start.
After next patches we apply them to the source and built 8.2.2-RELEASE but we now need two diffs, one versus 8.2-RELEASE another one versus 8.2.1-RELEASE for people who already 'updated', then
tar up the difference and put another two files on the
http for download.
Of course the size of the tarball can be greatly decreased by using
bdiff ... but as for start, we can use more bandwidth.
There is also a question how to apply the patch ... (or where to extract the changes)
As for needed space for more and more 'full built trees' CCACHE and ZFS with DEDUP and will be usefull, its already in HEAD so ...