Re: stable? quality assurance?

David Newall
2010-07-12T19:58:21Z

Stefan Richter wrote:
> David Newall wrote:
>
>> Thus 2.6.34 is the latest gamma-test kernel. It's not stable and I
>> doubt anybody honestly thinks otherwise.
>>
>
> It works stable for what I use it for.
>
Mea culpa. I didn't mean that 2.6.34 is unstable, but that the term
"stable" is not appropriate for a newly released kernel; "gamma" should
be used instead.

Merely six months ago 2.6.32 was released; today we're preparing for
2.6.35; a new kernel every two months! Perhaps 2.6.31 is truly the
latest stable kernel; or else 2.6.27 does, which is the other 2.6 on the
front page of kernel.org. I'm pretty sure 2.4 is stable (which might
explain why I see it embedded *much* more frequently than 2.6.)

> If it doesn't for you, then I hope you are already in contact with the
> respective subsystem developers to get the regressions that you
> experience fixed.
>
(Segue to a problem which follows from calling bleeding-edge kernels
"stable".)

When reporting bugs, the first response is often, "we're not interested
in such an old kernel; try it with the latest." That's not hugely
useful when the latest kernels are not suitable for production use. If
kernels weren't marked stable until they had earned the moniker, for
example 2.6.27, then the expectation of developers and of users would be
consistent: developers could expect users to try it again with latest
stable kernel, and users could reasonably expect that trying it wouldn't
break their system.