Using Ketchup to manage your kernel sources

Today I discovered Ketchup, a little command-line tool to manage your Linux kernel sources. If you're one of the weirdos, who is still compiling his kernel manually for whatever reason (like I do), I can only recommend it. Ketchup nicely eases up the entire process of checking for updates and applying them to your system.

Let's not hesitate and look at few usage examples... Want to know what's the latest version of a particular kernel-tree?

$ ketchup -s 2.6
2.6.17.7
$ ketchup -s 2.6-mm
2.6.18-rc1-mm2

Let's play with your kernel sources a bit. First of all, you surely want to check what version you currently got lying around...

$ cd /usr/src/linux
$ ketchup -m
2.6.17.6

Let's assume there is a newer kernel version available and you want to download it, bunzip it, revert the old patch and apply the new one. Nothing easier than that:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# ketchup 2.6-tip
2.6.17.6 -> 2.6.17.7
Applying patch-2.6.17.6.bz2 -R
Applying patch-2.6.17.7.bz2

That's really it. It will download the patches, revert and apply them, so all you will have to do is watch and wait
Switching to an entirely different kernel versions is just as easy:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# ketchup 2.6.16.2

Final note: If Ketchup should abort with a gpg error, then it couldn't verify the patch's or kernel's signature. Either add the 2.6 public key to your keyring (this is the proper solution) or call Ketchup with an additional -G parameter (this will override signature checking). I'd suggest the former, which is really easy to do by downloading it from a public pgp server:

# gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 0x517D0F0E

Have fun compiling,
muesli