Re: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans

Linus Torvalds
2006-09-21T05:23:40Z

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> Why would a shorter cycle be better? What are we trying to achieve?

I don't think a shorter cycle is necessarily better, but I think we could
try having a more "directed" cycle, and perhaps merge certain specific
things rather than everything.

That would possibly _cause_ a shorter cycle, if only because the problems
are hopefully more focused from the fact that we merged with a certain
focus.

Of course, it would likely just frustrate the people who didn't get
merged, and would need to wait for the next cycle. So it might be a net
negative, even if we'd bring individual cycles in a bit.

> > The cycles seem to be stretching out again, and I don't really think
> > it's worth it to hold up the entire kernel for every single piddly
> > little regression to get fixed. We'll _never_ be perfect, even if we
> > weren't slackers.

I think that's true. 2.6.18 got delayed partly due to me beign away, but I
also think that it then got delayed too much afterwards too, just because
I felt a bit nervous about having been away ;)

So it definitely stretched out too much.

Whether there is a lot we can do about it, I dunno. In many ways, the real
issue is simply that we have a lot of changes. And people are _never_ as
interested in the testing part as they were in writing new code..

Linus