Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:21:40 -0700
From: Michael Loftis <mloftis@wgops.com>
To: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Cc: dtor_core@ameritech.net, James Courtier-Dutton <James@superbug.co.uk>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Development tree, PLEASE?
Message-ID: <E27F809F04C1C673D283E84F@d216-220-25-20.dynip.modwest.com>
In-Reply-To: <200601201903.k0KJ3qI7006425@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
References: <D1A7010C56BB90C4FA73E6DD@dhcp-2-206.wgops.com>
 <43D10FF8.8090805@superbug.co.uk>
 <6769FDC09295B7E6078A5089@d216-220-25-20.dynip.modwest.com>
 <d120d5000601200850w611e8af8v41a0786b7dc973d9@mail.gmail.com>           
 <30D11C032F1FC0FE9CA1CDFD@d216-220-25-20.dynip.modwest.com>
 <200601201903.k0KJ3qI7006425@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Content-Length: 1627
Lines: 35


--On January 20, 2006 2:03:52 PM -0500 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

> But you're perfectly happy to make the kernel developers do the
> equivalent thing when they have to maintain 2 forks (a stable and devel).
> Go back and look at the status of the 2.5 tree - there were *large*
> chunks of time when 2.4 or 2.5 would get an important bugfix, but the
> other tree wouldn't get it for *weeks* because of the hassle of
> cross-porting the patch.

To more fully respond though....

Weeks is fine, and better than never.  And there may be cases in which the 
decision has to be made to 'abandon' a particular stable release in favor 
of a newer version because of the difficulty or inability to backport fixes.

I think that it's fine to push the maintenance effort away from the 
mainline developers, probably even desireable, but then the bugfixing/etc 
tends to happen in a disparate manner, off on lots of forks at different 
places without them making their way back to some central place.

And that seems where we're going with this conversation.  A fork/forks at 
various versions to maintain bugfixes and support updates that's (more?) 
open to submitters writing patches.  Maintained by a separate group or 
party, but with the 'blessing' from mainline to do so.  A place for those 
sorts of efforts to be focused, without necessarily involving the primary 
developers.


-
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/