Re: My thoughts on the "new development model"

John Richard Moser
2004-10-27T15:36:37Z

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Theodore Ts'o wrote:
| On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 09:48:01AM -0400, John Richard Moser wrote:
|
|>I for one don't give a damn. Bugs and how fast this development model
|>fix them aren't a concern to me; although I'd never slow down the bug
|>fixing process. My concern is getting a real stable tree for various
|>maintainers to base on, so that various patches for drivers, security
|>enhancements, and other things aren't scattered across versions and
|>impossible to patch together even when they're noninvasive to eachother.
|>
|>Have you stopped to consider that the features that are critical to me
|>are also holding me back from upgrading to the newer kernels?
|>Ironically, these are security features, and the newer kernels have
|>newer security fixes aside from new schedulers and other toys I could
|>really enjoy having around.
|
|
| So instead of kvetching, why don't you
|
| (a) Create your own stable series by snapshotting some 2.6.x tree
| every six months, and then maintain a set of bug-fix only patches
| against that 2.6.x tree? Then convince the security people to port to
| that particular 2.6.x-jrm tree?
|

- - Convince the security people
- -- PaX, GrSecurity (2.6.7)
- -- LIDS (2.6.8.1) (not my problem)
- -- RSBAC (The author works his ass off, 2.6.6-9)
- - Convince VM hacker projects
- -- linuxcompressed is dead anyway; but they'd have a hard time keeping
~ up; there's been VM changes a few times already ne?
- - Convince filesystem and driver projects. No particular examples,
~ although I could see things happening that would affect them (another
~ reason why we need a fully upwards-compatible driver ABI)

| (b) Convince the security folks to try to get their patches into the
| mm- tree, for eventual inclusion into 2.6.
|

I've tried that. They don't want to. I don't blame them.

What I *am* aiming for is getting a few security enhancements included
in mainline for several Linux distributions, starting with Debian and
Ubuntu. This will predictibly create a blockage at 2.6.7 (where
PaX/GRSec are, since those are a major part of the scheme); they won't
be able to upgrade past there without losing a major protection, and the
authors will likely continue to simply sit around and wait for 2.6 to
stop changing so damn much.

| (c) Some combination of the two.
|
| Either would probably be more likely to fulfill your needs than just
| whining about it.
|
| - Ted
| -
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- --
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