Re: New dev model (was [PATCH] delete devfs)

[Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com>]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 06:21:27AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> > So now the world is divided in gods (i.e distributions) and we,
> > mere mortals who should pray to the gods to give us a stable
> >  kernel ?
> 
> This seems to be where a lot of the misunderstanding is.  Did anybody
> notice just how divergent the distributors' 2.4 (and prior) kernels were
> from the mainline?  If you wanted a kernel with that level of features
> and stability, you had to get it from them - or apply hundreds of
> patches yourself.
> 
> One of the goals of the process now is to get those distributor patches
> into the mainline quickly.  My expectation is that the mainline kernel
> will be far closer to what the distributors ship than it has been in a
> long time, and the mainline will be more stable for it.  Just the
> opposite of what a lot of people are saying.

Well, back in v2.4 "hot-stop", most of the patches merged into distro's kernels 
were not "trustable" enough to be merged into v2.4 mainline, and I had no capability 
of reviewing them myself and make a good enough judgment of whether they should be included
or not.

Another point I had against merging some of those patches was that most of them were 
targeted at "enterprise" users and benefit almost only them (eg finer-grained locking, etc). 

To resume, I prefered to be more "conservative". 

Of course, fortunately Andrew is much more capable of doing judgements on
"trustability" of patches and so forth.

Obviously its a good thing to try to keep the differences between distro's kernels
and mainline kernels small, and Andrew is targetting that.