Red Hat’s “obfuscated” kernel source

“Several readers have pointed out this interview with Maximilian
Attems, posted by Raphaël Hertzog. Therein, Maximilian states
that, while the cross-distribution cooperation on the 2.6.32 kernel
has been a great thing, Red Hat is making things harder by shipping
its RHEL 6 kernel source as one big tarball, without breaking out
the patches. Your editor has downloaded the 2.6.32-71.14.1.el6
source package and verified that this is the case.

“One of the key points behind the RPM and Debian package formats
is that source is shipped in its upstream form, with patches
shipped separately and applied at build time. Red Hat has always
followed this convention; the failure to do so with the RHEL 6
kernel is a new and discouraging change of behavior.”

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