Re: New (now current development process)

Russell King
2005-10-31T00:17:04Z

On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 01:48:56AM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Sunday 30 October 2005 20:12, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > The freezes are for fixing bugs, especially recent regressions. There's no
> > shortage of them, you know.
> >
> > I you can think of a better way to get kernel developers off their butts
> > and actually fixing bugs, I'm all ears.
>
> The problem is that you usually cannot do proper bug fixing because
> the release might be just around the corner, so you typically
> chose the ugly workaround or revert, or just reject changes for bugs that a
> are too risky or the impact too low because there is not enough time to
> properly test anymore.
>
> It might work better if we were told when the releases would actually
> happen and you don't need to fear that this not quite tested everywhere
> bugfix you're about to submit might make it into the gold kernel, breaking
> the world for some subset of users.

Indeed - a prime example is the bootmem initialisation problem. Had
I known on 1st October that the final release wouldn't have been for
a long time, I'd have applied that patch and you wouldn't have had
that problem with ARM relying on the bootmem initialisation order
clashing with your ia64 (or x86_64) swiotlb fix.

But stupid rmk - again I hasten to add - was suckered into this "-rc
is frozen" idea again and decided it wasn't appropriate to submit it.
In hind-sight, there would have been plenty of time to sort out any
issues.

Hell, we held up 2.6.14 for swiotlb _anyway_.

Time to start writing those lines...
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.
I must learn to ignore what Linus says about frozen releases.

--
Russell King
Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core