Re: [RFC] Removing sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel

On martedì 2 giugno 2026 19:04:06 Ora legale dell’Europa centrale Sam James wrote:
> Is there a particular reason? In Gentoo, we've never done extensive
> patching of the kernel, which we see as a feature. It's only a small set
> of config options, sometimes a few backports, and maybe one or two other
> small things.
> 
> If you really want to duplicate that work, feel free, but why do you
> then need a package for it?

I agree with Sam here. `gentoo-sources` is not comparable to something like the RHEL 
kernel sources; it remains very close to the upstream kernel, with a relatively small set of 
Gentoo-specific patches on top.


On martedì 2 giugno 2026 13:03:00 Ora legale dell’Europa centrale Agostino Sarubbo 
wrote:
> Therefore, I would suggest one of the following approaches:
> 
> 1) Drop vanilla-sources as well.
> 2) Drop vanilla-sources and add a vanilla USE flag to gentoo-sources.

To reduce the maintenance effort, another option that I did not mention before would be 
to keep vanilla-sources only as 9999 ebuilds, one per supported upstream branch, for 
example 5.10.9999, 5.15.9999, and so on.

This way, users could always pull the latest version of their preferred kernel branch 
through Portage, while significantly reducing the maintenance burden associated with 
version bumps.