[wplug-bsd] Patching a driver

[Brandon Kuczenski]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Poyner, Brandon wrote:

> I can only answer the basics as it's been a while.  The first thing to
> do is look for an existing FreeBSD bug report and then see if anybody's
> reported and fixed it in OpenBSD or NetBSD.  You really want an official
> fix for this in cvs, right?  Here is a FreeBSD bug report, it's light on
> details.  Can you assist in confirming that ip->i_nlink really doesn't
> return the right value?
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=86965&cat=
>

Well, I can confirm that 'ls -l' displays 0 hard links for all files and 
directories on the mounted filesystem. That's not right, right?

Looking in the handbook, it seems that I can specify a list of modules to 
build with the MODULES_OVERRIDE directive in make.conf... is there a way 
(also, is it responsible) to not build the kernel itself?  I think my 
/usr/obj tree is still fully populated, and I would love to be able to 
build just this module.

> I'm not sure what the "BSD way" of tracking your own patches would be.
> You could certainly create your own CVS and check in your one change but
> that's massive overkill.  If you don't cvsup all that often you might
> use rcs to track your changes.  It's really best to get the official
> fix.

It doesn't seem like a fix to a non-critical, low-priority bug in what 
really amounts to a legacy driver will be forthcoming.  Furthermore, from 
the bug report it appears the maintaner is aware of the fix and probably 
not interested in applying it since it is, after all, a hack (simply 
report '1' link instead of '0' so that Samba doesn't break).  It's still 
not the correct number of links, and so, not a proper fix.

I mean, rebuildng the kernel isn't much of a hassle.. I'm just trying to 
be optimal.

-Brandon