Re: RFD: Kernel release numbering

Gene Heskett
2005-03-04T23:52:17Z

On Friday 04 March 2005 15:37, Linus Torvalds wrote:
[...]
>No.
>
>I used to do "-pre", a long time ago. Exactly because they were
>synchronization points for developers.
>
>These days, that's pointless. We keep the tree in pretty good
> working order (certainly as good as my -pre's ever were)
> constantly, and developers who need to can synchronize with either
> the BK tree or the nightly snapshots. The fact is, 99% of the
> developers don't even need to do that, since most of the
> development process is quite well parallellised by now, and there
> is seldom any serious overlap.

And I think your use of bitkeeper is largely responsible for that.

>So the point of -pre's are gone. Have people actually _looked_ at
> the -rc releases? They are very much done when I reach the point
> and say "ok, let's calm down". The first one is usually pretty big
> and often needs some fixing, simply because the first one is
> _inevitably_ (and by design) the one that gets the pent-up demand
> from the previous calming down period.
>
>But it's very much a call to "ok, guys, calm down now".
>
>And if you aren't calming down, it's _your_ problem. Complaining
> about naming of -pre vs -rc is pointless.
>
>The even/odd situation would have made for a situation that some
> people seem to be arguing for (more explicit calming-down period),
> but with the difference that I think the odd ones should definitely
> have been user-release quality already. But that one was apparently
> hated by so many people that it's not even worth trying.
>
>The fact is, there is no perfect way of doing things, and this
> discussion has degenerated into nothing but whining. Which is kind
> of expected, but let's hope that the only non-whining that came out
> of this (Greg & co's trials with 2.6.x.y) ends up being worthwhile.
>
> Linus
One last Q I guess. When was the last time somebody flushed a bug out
of forcedeth? I built a kernel last night after turning off the
broken flag, and when I rebooted to it this morning I was surprised
to see that because its still marked experimental, I had no
networking. And when I went to turn that back on, I also had to go
turn that back on seperately.

IMO, no usefull purpose is achieved by keeping it experimental after
the amount of time thats gone by with 1/4 of the world whose mobo has
an NForce2 chipset on it, using that as their networking driver.

My $0.02.

--
Cheers, Gene
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