On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 11:41:20PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> Humm, may be suspect.  I wish gentoo would not change the version numbers 
> rather willy-nilly so that those of us used to the gnu.org version 
> numbers applied to the tarballs (this IS the src of tar BTW) among the 
> various distro's.  I've heard maybe 2 other similar queries, naming that 
> 1.16 puppy.

FWIW, Gentoo sticks to the upstream version numbers, only appending
-rXXX for local versions.  You can see what patches are applied pretty
easily from the ebuild.  In this case:
  
http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/app-arch/tar/tar-1.16-r2.ebuild?rev=1.12&view=markup
with patches
  
http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/app-arch/tar/files/tar-1.16-remove-GNUTYPE_NAMES.patch?rev=1.1&view=markup
  
http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/app-arch/tar/files/tar-1.16-segv.patch?rev=1.1&view=markup
both of which are from upstream (sorry for the long URLs)

> Once again, I wonder what the real patch level is that gentoo kernel is.  
> Its an arbitrary name that doesn't appear to follow the kernel.org naming 
> convention, so who knows how many patches may have been backported to it.  

That's a much trickier question, but again there's help to be had.  See
  http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches/
for info on the patches applied, although it might be quicker to go to
the gentoo-kernel AT gentoo DOT org mailing list and present the issue there.
They will also likely have the resources to help you in your search, or
at least discover some extra datapoints for you.  I'd help out, but I
don't have any boxes on which I can experiment with kernel versions.

Dustin

-- 
        Dustin J. Mitchell
        Storage Software Engineer, Zmanda, Inc.
        http://www.zmanda.com/