Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261633AbVCCIio (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2005 03:38:44 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261634AbVCCIio (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2005 03:38:44 -0500 Received: from parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk ([195.92.249.252]:61061 "EHLO parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261633AbVCCIik (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2005 03:38:40 -0500 Message-ID: <4226CCFE.2090506@pobox.com> Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 03:38:22 -0500 From: Jeff Garzik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040922 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg KH CC: Linus Torvalds , Russell King , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: RFD: Kernel release numbering References: <20050302230634.A29815@flint.arm.linux.org.uk> <42265023.20804@pobox.com> <20050303002047.GA10434@kroah.com> <20050303081958.GA29524@kroah.com> In-Reply-To: <20050303081958.GA29524@kroah.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2729 Lines: 58 Greg KH wrote: > On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 05:15:36PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > >>The thing is, I _do_ believe the current setup is working reasonably well. >>But I also do know that some people (a fairly small group, but anyway) >>seem to want an extra level of stability - although those people seem to >>not talk so much about "it works" kind of stability, but literally a "we >>can't keep up" kind of stability (ie at least a noticeable percentage of >>that group is not complaining about crashes, they are complaining about >>speed of development). >> >>And I suspect that _anything_ I do won't make those people happy. > > > That single sentence sums it up perfectly. When I have given talks > about how our current development cycle works, and what's happening with > it, people just feel odd seeing all of this change happen and get upset > at it. Perhaps it's because they never paid attention before, or that > they are new to Linux and like to believe that old-style development > models were somehow "better", and that they know we are doing something > wrong. > > But when pressed about the issue of speed of development, rate of > change, feature increase, driver updates, and so on, no one else has any > clue of what to do. They respond with, "but only put bugfixes into a > stable release." My comeback is explaining how we handle lots of > different types of bugfixes, by api changes, real fixes, and driver > updates for new hardware. Sometimes these cause other bugs to happen, > or just get shaken out where they were previously hiding (acpi is a > great example of this issue.) In the end, they usually fall back on > muttering, "well, I'm just glad that I'm not a kernel developer..." and > back away. The pertinent question for a point release (2.6.X.Y) would simply be "does a 2.6.11 user really need this fix?" > Like I previously said, I think we're doing a great job. The current > -mm staging area could use some more testers to help weed out the real > issues, and we could do "real" releases a bit faster than every 2 months > or so. But other than that, we have adapted over the years to handle > this extremely high rate of change in a pretty sane manner. I think Linus's "even/odd" proposal is an admission that 2.6.X releases need some important fixes after it hits kernel.org. Otherwise 2.6.X is simply a constantly indeterminent state. We need to serve users, not just make life easier for kernel developers ;-) Jeff - 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/