[CentOS] maintaining patches across releases

[Keith Keller]

Hi all,

I have what might be a foolish question about patching packages.  I am
not sure exactly how to phrase the question, so please follow up if it
seems as though I'm not being clear.

I was looking at this bug which my machines are currently experiencing:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=883905

The proposed patch is literally one new line in the XFS codebase.  So
since the patch is so straightforward, I had a crazy idea that I would
build my own kernel with this patch, and test it out to see if it
worked.  (It's been many years since I built my own kernel, so that
would be an adventure in and of itself.)

My worry would be, I would want to make sure that I propagated this
patch every time I updated the kernel package.  Is this something
others do regularly?  If so, is there a standard way of managing
the process of applying one's own patches to a series of source
packages, and being able to re-patch and rebuild updated packages?

I'm guessing that I just need to build xfs.ko.  Are there any gotchas
beyond the wiki entry on building your own kernel modules?  That page
seems to target CentOS 5, not 6, but I imagine the process is quite
similar.

--keith

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us