On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 10:17 AM, William Hooper <whooperhsd at gmail.com> wrote: > >>> Perhaps a silly question, but why maintain patches ? Why not compile a >>> new version and discard all the patches ? Patches are a messy manner to >>> maintain programmes. >> >> For the same reason that Red Hat uses patches to back port security >> updates and functionality into the kernel, httpd, and most of the >> other packages in RHEL. > > I thought that was no longer true for the 6.x kernel. The difference is that the kernel tarball provided in the SRPM is a Red Hat kernel, not a vanilla kernel. Just because the patches are not in the SRPM doesn't mean they don't exist. -- William Hooper