Re: Ptrace hole / Linux 2.2.25

Jeff Garzik
2003-03-23T21:39:59Z

Martin J. Bligh wrote:
>>>But if you assume this, what are the official releases for anyway?
>>
>>Well, official releases have always been sort of arbitrary for the
>>kernel... just labeled releases along the course of development.
>>Although with the recent addition of the -rc patches, they tend to
>>ensure the latest round of development at least resulted in a stable
>>release. But look at all the major vendors - their 2.4.18 release, for
>>example, may include whatever the latest pre-patch was at the time.
>
>
> I don't agree that's always been true by any means. It may currently
> be true, but that's far from a good thing. The current state of divergance
> the distros have from mainline 2.4 is IMHO the biggest problem Linux has
> today.
>
> The distros inherently have a conflict of interest getting changes merged
> back into mainline ... it's time consuming to do, it provides them no real
> benefit (they have to maintain their huge trees anyway), and it actively
> damages the "value add" they provide.

Just to underscore Arjan's point: non-mainline patches are very
actively discouraged at Red Hat. As time progresses the maintenance
cost of EACH non-mainline patch increases. Non-mainline patches do not
get the benefits of wide community testing, review, and feedback.
Further, Red Hat employees in my experience typically land patches in
the community _first_ -- witness my netdriver work (goes me -> Marcelo
-> RH), DaveM's net stack work, and Alan's -ac tree.

Jeff