[ILUG] ILUG member gets slagging in LWN (fwd)

[Padraig Brady]

Niall O Broin wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 09:21:57AM +0000, kevin lyda wrote:
> 
> 
>>>      * Perhaps not the most exciting patch of the week: Padraig Brady has a
>>>	large patch which strips trailing whitespace from the kernel source.
>>>
>>>bah!  Laudable, I say,
>>>
>>this was brought up on saturday.  it reduces kernel size by 200k.  sadly
>>it's a 23meg diff.  wonder if it could be distributed in script form?
>>
> 
> Padraig also submitted the line or two of Perl code which does the job. We
> should have held Alan hostage until Linux agreed to run the script :-)
> 
> 
> Niall
> 
> 


Why I oughta.. I wonder have they upgraded wu-ftpd yet?... 

yes, damn :-)


Well the 23MB diff was done partly in jest.
Anyway the outcome is that we'll probably put a script
in linux/scripts/ to strip whitespace from any subsequent
patches? BTW applying the diff would have ment a compressed
saving of 140K (bz2) which I'd say kernel.org wouldn't
snub their noses at (well it is only 0.58% decrease I suppose).

Another thing which might be a good idea is to minimise
the download size for people who just want to download
linux point releases and compile the source for their
particular settings (most people who download the source
in my opinion). For this case you could strip all documentation
and different architectures. You could even preprocess all
the code to change variable names to a, aa, aaa, ... so
that it would compress well. A better suggestion from Kevin
Lyda was to rename the variables awhile, aif, ado, a, aa, ...

Padraig.