Re: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans

Andrew Morton
2006-09-21T18:00:18Z

On Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:25:55 -0700 (PDT)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > A suggestion from the department of evil ideas: Call even cycles
> > development odd ones stabilizing. Nothing gets into an odd one without a
> > review and linux-kernel signoff/ack ?
>
> I don't think that's an evil idea, and in fact we've discussed it before.
> I personally like it - right now we tend to have that "interminable series
> of -rc<n>" (where <n> is 3..) before release, and I'd almost personally
> prefer to just have a rule that is more along the lines of
>
> - 2.6.<odd> is "the big initial merges with all the obvious fixes to make
> it all work" (ie roughly the current -rc2 or perhaps -rc3).
>
> - 2.6.<even> is "no big merges, just careful fixes" (ie the current "real
> release")
>
> Each would be ~3 weeks, leaving us with effectively the same real release
> schedule, just a naming change.
>
> That said, I think Andrew was of the opinion that it doesn't really _fix_
> anything, and he may well be right. What's the point of the odd release,
> if the weekly snapshots after that are supposed to be strictly better than
> it anyway?
>
> So I think I may like it just because it _seems_ to combine the good
> features of both the old naming scheme and the current one, but I suspect
> Andrew may be right in that it doesn't _really_ change anything, deep
> down.
>

Again, before we can implement anything we should describe what problem we are
actually trying to solve here.

Jeff: "I want faster release cycles because <no reason given>"

Me: "I want less bugs"

Anyone else?