[PATCH] Add text for dealing with "dot releases" to README

The emergence of so-called "dot releases" that are non-incremental patches
against a base kernel requires different handling of patches (revert
previous patches before applying the newest one).  This patch adds a
paragrach to $TOPDIR/README explaining how to do deal with dot release
patches.

Signed-off-by: Kurt Wall <kwall@kurtwerks.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

diff --git a/README b/README
index 0df20f0..76dd780 100644 (file)
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -87,6 +87,16 @@ INSTALLING the kernel:
    kernel source.  Patches are applied from the current directory, but
    an alternative directory can be specified as the second argument.
 
    kernel source.  Patches are applied from the current directory, but
    an alternative directory can be specified as the second argument.
 

+ - If you are upgrading between releases using the stable series patches
+   (for example, patch-2.6.xx.y), note that these "dot-releases" are
+   not incremental and must be applied to the 2.6.xx base tree. For
+   example, if your base kernel is 2.6.12 and you want to apply the
+   2.6.12.3 patch, you do not and indeed must not first apply the
+   2.6.12.1 and 2.6.12.2 patches. Similarly, if you are running kernel
+   version 2.6.12.2 and want to jump to 2.6.12.3, you must first
+   reverse the 2.6.12.2 patch (that is, patch -R) _before_ applying
+   the 2.6.12.3 patch.
+

  - Make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around:
 
                cd linux
  - Make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around:
 
                cd linux