Sending git patches from a different box

Here's a solution to a problem that's been bothering me for a while: I wanted to create git patches from a box where there is no real MTA and so git send-email can't be used.

One option is setting up real mail MTA or something simpler like msmtp or nullmailer. While this is the preferable, "true unix" way, I think plenty of ordinary linux users don't have this either.

If, for whatever reason, this is not an option, but you have access to another box, where a MTA is set up correctly, you can do this:

1. commit the change(s) into the git tree
2. create the patch emails with: git format-patch --to to@addr ...
3. transfer the produced patch email files to the box where you can send mails from
4. send the email(s) with: /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t < mail-formatted.patch

The first time I suggest you send the patch to yourself to verify it's all working as expected.

This approach has a downside: You don't see the mails you sent in your MUA sent mail folder. Depending on your MUA, there are other ways of sending the mail. If you're using mutt, you might be in luck. But in general MUAs tend to mangle the patches. :-(

Configuring linux kernel for use on ALIX 2 -- update

Here is a short update on my older post on configuring linux kernel for use on ALIX2.

The general points are still valid. The specific locations of the options might have changed. But to provide something more up to date, here is a working linux 2.6.34.1 configuration for ALIX 2.

Use this only as a starting point to get a configuration that works well for you. There are plenty of options that are specific to my setup and you certainly want those changed. But you should be able to boot with this one.

Linux kernel configuration -- using configuration from an older version

As you probably know if you ever configured the linux kernel yourself (possibly by make menuconfig, or if you've been with linux long enough, by make config), the current kernel configuration that would be used for build is stored in the file .config.

The options in the .config file depend on the kernel version the file was produced with. So, you can't directly use a config file from an older kernel with a newer one. But what you can do is use make oldconfig. This way, the config options that are still present in the current kernel keep their values and you are asked to configure only what options were added.

To use this, just place the old .config file into the new kernel source tree and issue make oldconfig.

Yeah, this post was inspired by the comment asking for newer ALIX 2 kernel config. A comment that I missed. Sorry. Mike. :-(