[Nix-dev] end-of-life kernels

[Mathijs Kwik]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo at gnu.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think initially some of the old kernels were re-added by a colleague
> of mine to allow continuous integration testing of a kernel module
> against a variety of Linux versions.
>
> It’s no longer used, but that kind of use may still make sense.

It does, but I could say the same thing for firefox versions or ffmpeg
releases and more.
They too are useful for testing plugins and stuff against.

Of course, this is a very useful thing to do, but I think we should
keep those things separated from the main stuff.
I'm not saying out-of-repo, but probably grouped by usecase in
separate dirs, with minimal dependencies both up- and downward.
Exposing just 1 function, which you pass a list of modules, it will
build on many kernels (maybe even going back to 2.4). If you give
those kernels just a minimal kernel config, and matching header
versions per kernel, you can even do a vm-test-run on all (which would
now be problematic for kernels older than the default header version).

So all in all, very useful, but I think we shouldn't mix these cases
with main/default behaviour.

>
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.
>
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