Re: RFD: Kernel release numbering

Gene Heskett
2005-03-03T02:29:47Z

On Wednesday 02 March 2005 20:15, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Greg KH wrote:
>> I think this statement proves that the current development
>> situation is working quite well. The nasty breakage and details
>> got worked out in the -mm tree, and then flowed into your tree
>> when they seemed sane.
>
>Actually, the breakage I was talking about got fixed in _my_ tree.
>
>I'd love for the -mm tree to get more testing, but it doesn't.
>
Well, that might change if, when I came crying to the list about
something thats broken in an -mm release, I wasn't chased off to go
run a "more stable" release. Thats occured 2-3 times in the past
year.

I'll willingly play the canary as long as I don't wind up with a
totally hosed filesystem. So far, knock on wood, I've been fairly
lucky and have not had to do a bare metal recovery from amanda.

>> So, any driver stuff is just fine? Great, I don't have an issue
>> with your proposal then, as it wouldn't affect me that much :)
>
>I don't know about "any", but yeah.
>
>> I do understand what you are trying to achieve here, people don't
>> really test the -rc releases as much as a "real" 2.6.11 release.
>> Getting a week of testing and bugfix only type patches to then
>> release a 2.6.12 makes a lot of sense. For example, see all of
>> the bug reports that came out of the woodwork today on lkml from
>> the 2.6.11 release...
>
>A large part of it is psychological. On the other hand, it may be
> that Neil is right and it would just mean that people wouldn't even
> test the odd releases (..because they want to wait a couple of
> weeks for the even one), so it may not actually end up helping
> much.
>
>The thing is, I _do_ believe the current setup is working reasonably
> well. But I also do know that some people (a fairly small group,
> but anyway) seem to want an extra level of stability - although
> those people seem to not talk so much about "it works" kind of
> stability, but literally a "we can't keep up" kind of stability (ie
> at least a noticeable percentage of that group is not complaining
> about crashes, they are complaining about speed of development).
>
>And I suspect that _anything_ I do won't make those people happy.
>
> Linus
>-
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--
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.