Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2003 09:16:46 -0800
From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@work.bitmover.com>, Tim Cambrant <tim@cambrant.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Too soon for stable release?
Message-ID: <20031129171646.GB19856@holomorphy.com>
Mail-Followup-To: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>,
	Larry McVoy <lm@work.bitmover.com>, Tim Cambrant <tim@cambrant.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
References: <20031129174916.GA4592@cambrant.com> <20031129170104.GA15333@work.bitmover.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20031129170104.GA15333@work.bitmover.com>
Organization: The Domain of Holomorphy
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 06:49:16PM +0100, Tim Cambrant wrote:
>> I am sorry if this offends someone or if I'm totally on the wrong track
>> here, but it seems odd to actually call the Beaver On Detox "stable",
>> considering the amount of misc. problems people have been having the
>> last week with -test11. 

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 09:01:04AM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> The "stable" series of the kernel is never really stable for a while. 
> A better way to think of it is as "that place where things become stable
> by refusing to take any new changes except bug fixes".  
> The news media hasn't picked up on this yet, they seem to think that
> 2.6.0 is something that will be useful.  It won't be, there will be a
> period of months during which things stablize and then you'll see the
> distros pick up the release.  I don't remember where it was exactly
> (2.4.18?) but Red Hat waited quite a while before switching to 2.4
> from 2.2.  This is normal and it works out quite well in practice.

ISTR something about 2.4.9 lasting far, far, far, far, far, far longer
than it should have... and it's not dead yet!!!

2.6 is likely to buck this trend anyway.

-- wli
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/