Re: starting with 2.7

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 12:34:09PM -0300, Horst von Brand wrote:
> Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch> said:
> > * Theodore Ts'o <20050104002452.GA8045@thunk.org> 2005-01-03 19:24
> > > I was thinking more about every week or two (ok, two releases in a day
> > > like we used to do in the 2.3 days was probably too freequent :-), but
> > > sure, even going to a once-a-month release cycle would be better than
> > > the current 3 months between 2.6.x releases.
> 
> > It definitely satifies many of the impatients but it doesn't solve the
> > stability problem. Many bugs do not show up on developer machines until
> > just right after the release (as you pointed out already). rc releases
> > don't work out as expected due to various reasons, i think one of them
> > is that rc releases don't get announced on the newstickers, extra work
> > is required to patch the kernel etc. What about doing a test release
> > just before releasing the final version. I'm not talking about yet
> > another 2 weeks period but rather just 2-3 days and at most 2 bk
> > releases in between.
> 
> And most users will just wait the extra 2 or 3 days before timidly dipping
> in. Doesn't work.

Some will start testing right away, others will wait 2 or 3 days
first.  And that's fine.  Not all 2.6.x kernels will be good; but if
we do releases every 1 or 2 weeks, some of them *will* be good.  The
problem with the -rc releases is that we try to predict in advance
which releases in advance will be stable, and we don't seem to be able
to do a good job of that.  If we do a release every week, my guess is
that at least 1 in 3 releases will turn out to be stable enough for
most purposes.  But we won't know until after 2 or 3 days which
releases will be the good ones.

In practice, that's all the -rc releases are these days anyway (there
are times when a 2.6.x-rcy release is more stable than 2.6.z).  The
problem is that since the -rc releases are called what they are
called, they don't get enough testing.

						- Ted