Re: runtime control.c

[William Cohen <wcohen at redhat dot com>]

Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> Hi -
>
>
> > On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 15:42 -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> >
> > > It would be best not to have to upgrade systemtap every
> > > time a kernel update goes out.
> >
> > I think it is a reasonable requirement that systemtap be rebuilt for
> > each kernel release, at least initially.
>
>
> For what it's worth, I do not agree, just as it would be wrong to
> to recompile kernel-utils, oprofile, etc., every time.

It is definitely better to have the software uncoupled, so one does not 
need to do an upgrade of multiple packages. However, for kernel modules, 
there is going to be a need to recompile modules when a new kernel comes 
out.

OProfile doesn't have to be recompiled everytime. The oprofile kernel 
module is in the kernel rpm. There was a period where the interface 
between kernel and userspace was changing, so both kernel and oprofile 
needed to be changed together.

> For the immediate future, these parts of the runtime will probably
> need to be packaged into a separate rpm, as roland suggested.  Want
> to give it a go?

ndiswrapper (provides a way of using window wireless drivers in linux) 
has a similiar problem. The srpm creates two rpms: a strictly user space 
rpm and an rpm versioned for the kernel:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/

-Will