[Raspbian-devel] Proper way for vendors to build deb packages of kernels.

[peter green]

Currently the raspberry pi foundation build their kernel and firmware 
into the same package in a way that does not work with dkms or generally 
integrate with Debian stuff. I've recently been talking to shiftplusone 
(who works for them) about the possibility of improving this.

Currently i'm aware of three ways of building deb packaged kernels.

1: modify the Debian "linux" source package
2: use make deb-pkg
3: use make-kpkg

Option 1 can be made to work and probablly gives the closest experiance 
to kernels actually from Debian but it's a PITA, especially if there are 
a large number of changes from the source tree Debian uses. We do 
produce kernel package from a mashup of the Debian "linux" source 
package and the raspberry pi foundation's git tree but they are a pain 
to update and so tend to be updated far less frequently than the 
raspberry pi foundation's kernels.

Option 2 doesn't seem able to produce source packages, so it's ok for 
packages built for yourself but no so good for stuff you are going to 
distribute (much easier to track license compliance if you have a 
corresponding source package for every deb).

Option 3 also doesn't seem able to produce source packages and 
furthermore seems to be rather undermaintained (the readme for example 
still references libc5)

Does anyone have any other suggestions on what the best way for a vendor 
to take a kernel source tree (not debian derived) and produce deb 
packages and a debian source package from it?