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Message-ID: <4d8e3fd304102614002285559e@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 23:00:43 +0200
From: Paolo Ciarrocchi <paolo.ciarrocchi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: Paolo Ciarrocchi <paolo.ciarrocchi@gmail.com>
To: John Richard Moser <nigelenki@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: Let's make a small change to the process
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>,
       William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>,
       "Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdl.org>, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk,
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On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 16:48:59 -0400, John Richard Moser
<nigelenki@comcast.net> wrote:
[...]
> 
> | We, of course, need a maintainer for it,
> 
> Yes, a little too much to maintain though isn't it?  Maintainers to
> continuously upkeep revisions that come out every few weeks potentially?
> ~ Remember it's got to be able to withstand the test of time for quite a
> while; why are people still maintaining 2.2?
> 
> | maybe someone from OSDL (Randy?), maybe wli (he maintained his tree
> | for a long time), maybe Alan (that is already applying these kind of
> | fixes to his tree), maybe someone else... ?
> |
> 
> Common courteousy, don't volunteer people.  :)

Just wrote name a few "famous" and "great" kernel hackers :)
 
> | Sounds reasonable ?
> |
> 
> Sounds too fast.  I don't predict having a maintainer for each minor
> release of the kernel (which is what you're saying here essentially), so
> there'd be a need for one or a handfull of maintainers to spend loads of
> time backporting fixes to a quickly mounting set of kernels.

Yes, one maintainer.
But I'm not sure that each minor release of ther kernel needs a .Y version.
 
> I had <shameless plug> suggested an hour or two ago a scheme where the
> current development model be based off, but periodic releases be made
> "stable," basing on approximately 6 months between releases </shameless
> plug>.  I think it's a bit more sane to say that a maintainer may mount
> up 4 kernels in 2 years to backport bugfixes into, if nobody else steps
> up to the plate to help.
> 
> Of course, eventually official support has to be dropped in either
> scheme, because the same problem is faced:  We can't expect people to
> maintain a continuously mounting number of kernel revisions once the
> workload becomes sufficiently high.  A balance must be made between
> dropping support for a non-volitile code base, and maintaining a support
> period sufficiently long.

Not sure I get your point.
Again,
-ac is almost what I'm suggesting but I'd prefer to change it's name
and formalize it publishing the .Y patchset to kernel,org with a name
useful for the users.

Time to sleep now,
I'll flight to Germany tomorrow so I'll be offline till Tuesday. 
But hey, you don't need me anymore ;-)

-- 
Paolo
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