Re: Ptrace hole / Linux 2.2.25

Arjan van de Ven
2003-03-23T20:27:11Z

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 12:30:43PM -0800, Martin J. Bligh wrote:

> 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.

I take a strong objection to this. I can't speak for all distros, but I
know that Red Hat has a strong preference to get things merged upstream as
soon as possible. I think you are absolutely wrong about the "no
real benefit" part and that you totally misunderstand what value add
distributions provide.

> If that's people's attitude ("you should use a vendor"), then we need a
> 2.4-fixed tree to be run by somebody with an interest in providing
> critical bugfixes to the community with no distro ties.

this is not about distros or vendors (yes IBM is a linux vendor too). at
all. Marcelo is in a tough position; either he releases an emergency
kernel with a patch applied that seems to have a few corner case issues,
or he starts to rush out 2.4.21 based on the current
2.4.21-pre codebase. Given that there are other bugs in 2.4.20
that makes people say "but THIS needs to be in too", I can see
that becoming a very fuzzy thing pretty quick. Apparantly Marcelo decided
to go for the "get 2.4.21 out soon" approach.....

Greetings,
Arjan van de Ven