From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S267313AbUGVWXN (ORCPT ); Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:23:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267314AbUGVWXN (ORCPT ); Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:23:13 -0400 Received: from mail.tmr.com ([216.238.38.203]:39186 "EHLO gatekeeper.tmr.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267313AbUGVWXE (ORCPT ); Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:23:04 -0400 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Path: not-for-mail From: Bill Davidsen Newsgroups: mail.linux-kernel Subject: Re: A users thoughts on the new dev. model Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 18:25:46 -0400 Organization: TMR Associates, Inc Message-ID: References: <40FFD760.8060504@unix.eng.ua.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: gatekeeper.tmr.com 1090534661 25534 192.168.12.100 (22 Jul 2004 22:17:41 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@tmr.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <40FFD760.8060504@unix.eng.ua.edu> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Evan Hisey wrote: > To the Dev list: > First, thanks for all the work on the kernel. I try to keep up with > the list via both KernelTrap and Kerneltraffic. Today I just saw the > discussion on the new development model. As an end use of the vanilla > tree, I would like to point out that a large number of people and > projects rely on the vanilla kernel to be the stable tree do to the > overly varied and random patching nature of vendor supplied kernels > making them hard to call reliable. In the case of my preferred distro > Slackware, the distro itself expects the vanilla tree to be stable and > reliable enough to not need any patches. I believe this is the case for > a large number off distro' s and end users. Thank you for your time. > Please send any flames,comments, or complaints via CC, as I am not > sucribed to the list. I confess I feel that this new model is a return to the bad old days when the stable tree wasn't. Sounds as if Andrew is bored with the idea of letting 2.7 be the development tree and just being the gatekeeper of STABLE new features for 2.6. Perhaps 2.7 should be opened and Andrew will have a place to play, and features can drift to 2.6 more slowly. I agree that vendor kernels often have unexpected behaviour, "improvements" on the API, etc. They sometimes protect the user from himself, so that code which works fine on a vendor kernel fails miserably on a mainline kernel. I'm sure developers will do whatever they please, but I think a development kernel would be nice about now, so people could try new things without restriction, and people who like to use a stable kernel could have one. -- -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me