Re: My thoughts on the "new development model"

Chuck Ebbert
2004-10-26T16:35:48Z

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 at 08:03:13 -0700 William Lee Irwin III wrote:

> I'm running 2.6 on a number of machines I rely upon
> heavily as servers etc. on the open net as well as the usual dedicated
> kernel hacking machines. The uptimes of the relied-upon systems are
> measured in months, at times approaching a year.

"It works for me" doesn't cut it in the OS world.

> More bugs are fixed than are introduced every release by a large margin.

Irrelevant.

> And not even your beloved 2.4 is immune to regressions.

We're not talking about regression, i.e. reappearance of old bugs.

> What does the number of patchsets have to do with anything?

Large changes produce bugs -- that's a fact of life.

It's not that the changes aren't needed, it's just the the previous 2.6 release
is kind of like a baby abandoned on a doorstep -- nobody has the time to fix
those last few bugs. Even if someone were to step up to the plate and try to
create a stable 2.6 series, I'd bet the lead developers wouldn't even spend time
working on it.

--Chuck Ebbert 26-Oct-04 12:31:08