Re: [RFC] 2.5/2.6/2.7 transition [was Re: Linux 2.4.16-pre1]

Linus Torvalds
2001-11-26T04:05:04Z

On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, Mike Fedyk wrote:
>
> Personally, I think that 2.4 was released too early. It was when the
> Internet hype was going full force, and nobody (including myself) could be
> faulted for getting swept up in the wave that it was.

That's not the problem, I think.

2.4.0 was appropriate for the time. The problem with _any_ big release is
that the people you _really_ want to test it won't test it until it is
stable, and you cannot make it stable before you have lots of testers. A
basic chicken-and-egg problem, in short.

You find the same thing (to a smaller degree) with the pre-patches, where
a lot more people end up testing the non-pre-patches, and inevitably there
are more percieved problems with the "real" version than with the
pre-patch. Just statistically you should realize that that is not actually
true ;)

> 1) Develop 2.5 until it is ready to be 2.6 and immediately give it over to
> a maintainer, and start 2.7.

I'd love to do that, but it doesn't really work very well. Simply because
whenever the "stable" fork happens, there are going to be issues that the
bleeding-edge guard didn't notice, or didn't realize how they bite people
in the real world.

So I could throw a 2.6 directly over the fence, and start a 2.7 series,
but that would have two really killer problems

(a) I really don't like giving something bad to whoever gets to be
maintainer of the stable kernel. It just doesn't work that way:
whoever would be willing to maintain such a stable kernel would be a
real sucker and a glutton for punishment.

(b) Even if I found a glutton for punishment that was intelligent enough
in other ways to be a good maintainer, the _development_ tree too
needs to start off from a "known reasonably good" point. It doesn't
have to be perfect, but it needs to be _known_.

For good of for bad, we actually have that now with 2.4.x - the system
does look fairly stable, with just some silly problems that have known
solutions and aren't a major pain to handle. So the 2.5.x release is off
to a good start, which it simply wouldn't have had if I had just cut over
from 2.4.0.

The _real_ solution is to make fewer fundamental changes between stable
kernels, and that's a real solution that I expect to become more and more
realistic as the kernel stabilizes. I already expect 2.5 to have a _lot_
less fundamental changes than the 2.3.x tree ever had - the SMP
scaliability efforts and page-cachification between 2.2.x and 2.4.x is
really quite a big change.

But you also have to realize that "fewer fundamental changes" is a mark of
a system that isn't evolving as quickly, and that is reaching middle age.
We are probably not quite there yet ;)

Linus