Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262404AbVCCK1D (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2005 05:27:03 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262409AbVCCK1D (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2005 05:27:03 -0500 Received: from levante.wiggy.net ([195.85.225.139]:28340 "EHLO mx1.wiggy.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262404AbVCCK06 (ORCPT ); Thu, 3 Mar 2005 05:26:58 -0500 Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 11:26:55 +0100 From: Wichert Akkerman To: Andrew Morton Cc: Jeff Garzik , greg@kroah.com, torvalds@osdl.org, rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: RFD: Kernel release numbering Message-ID: <20050303102655.GC31559@wiggy.net> Mail-Followup-To: Andrew Morton , Jeff Garzik , greg@kroah.com, torvalds@osdl.org, rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <20050302230634.A29815@flint.arm.linux.org.uk> <42265023.20804@pobox.com> <20050303002047.GA10434@kroah.com> <20050303081958.GA29524@kroah.com> <4226CCFE.2090506@pobox.com> <20050303090106.GC29955@kroah.com> <4226D655.2040902@pobox.com> <20050303021506.137ce222.akpm@osdl.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050303021506.137ce222.akpm@osdl.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040907i X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1657 Lines: 36 Previously Andrew Morton wrote: > I'd say that mainline kernel.org for the past couple of years has been a > technology, not a product. If you consider mainline a technology and distributions your main users, what is the use of a stable release every months or two months? No distribution is going to updates its release that often. Looking at the Debian kernel packages it took at least a month just to get a single release ready for distro use. Needless to say, Debian (or any other distro) is not going to go through that for every release. We already saw that with 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4 kernels: distributions rarely used the last mainline release but older released with (a sometimes huge amount of) patches. So continueing that thought pattern; why not go for something like 6 month release cycles? That seems to fit with a distro release cycles. > So I'd suspect that on average, kernel releases are getting more stable. > But the big big problem we have is that even though we fixed ten things for > each one thing we broke, those single breakages tend to be prominent, and > people get upset. It's fairly bad PR that Dell Inspiron keyboards don't > work in 2.6.11, for example... same for latitude keyboards after a resume I just discovered :( Wichert. -- Wichert Akkerman It is simple to make things. http://www.wiggy.net/ It is hard to make things simple. - 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/