[bernardwilson]

Would it not be possible to compute what patches have been applied?

I'd guess for many patches it'd be trivially easy to determine if they were in or out; for the rest a brute-force search could be done...

[burgerbrain]

"for the rest a brute-force search could be done..."

Huhwhat? Brute force: A + B + C = D, where D and A are known.

[pyre]

I'm assuming the parent was talking about publicly available patches, not internally developed Red Hat ones. In that case, you could determine B and C out of a list of possible values by brute-forcing.

[bernardwilson]

No, some of Bs will be known as they're public patches.

the remaining aggregate of C would be 'redhat patch to 2.6.x-y'.