Re: Linux 2.6.32-rc3

Frans Pop
2009-10-06T17:10:14Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> And what people are suggesting with a 2.6.32-rc0 would just lead to
> people now rebasing their work NOT EVEN ON A RELEASE. They'd want to
> rebase it on top of that made-up commit (2.6.32-rc0), so now from a
> development standpoint that commit suddenly becomes more important than
> the release itself.

IMO you're looking at this from the wrong side: the developer PoV. The
request is made from a *user* PoV.
Users very simply want to avoid that they accidentally install a merge
window kernel over their stable kernel. IMO that makes sense.

Developers are supposed to be able to take care of themselves; the mainline
tree should aim to make things easy for users.

I see the release versions purely as reference points. And -rc0 is
obviously useless from that perspective, which is why it should be just a
Makefile thing and not a tag. But -rc0 is IMO very useful to distinguish
what kernels someone has installed.

BTW, including the commit number in the version string has a major
disadvantage: kernels will get installed *alongside* eachother instead of
the newer kernel replacing the older one. Result is that /boot partitions
fill up much more quickly.

Cheers,
FJP