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SubjectRe: kernel structures 2.0.29->2.0.30
At 1:49 Uhr +0200 26-04-1997, Alan Cox wrote:
>> modification in a stable release was careful weighted and overcautiously
>> studied. This is clearly no longer true and I regret it. It seems Linux
>> developers lost the problem of "pure" users (not developers). 2.0.x
>> kernels have introduced new stuff and this is not acceptable (the Apache
>> break in 2.0.14 was specially catastrophic).
>
>2.0.14 broke for SMP and Apache only. It broke because a fix that was
>causing Oopses for people running Apache got fixed. And because the SMP
>bug was WEEEIIIIIRD it took till .18 to fix.

Ok, the Apache break bit me too, but nobody urged me to upgrade to 2.0.14
and I didn't had problems with 2.0.13 either. I simply had a little bit
time to spend to compile and reboot. The "bug" showed up immediately, Ok,
no problem, rebooted with 2.0.13, wrote a message in Linux-Kernel, got a
message with a fix a few hours (!) later from Linus. So what's catastrophic
about that?

>> major change. From 2.0 to 2.1 a smaller change and from 2.0.29 to 2.0.30
>> just some bug fixes. Otherwise, we are not better than Microsoft which
>> uses versioning for marketing.
>
>One problem we have is no version space for an "incremental upgrade".
>Solaris for example goes 2.2,2.3,2.4,2.5 and then has the 2.5.1 release
>which is 2.5 patched and improved a bit but not a major change. 2.0.30
>is the equivalent of that

I liked the pre-patch approach for 2.0.30 very much, it could avoid many
real versions. Eventually you could split up the pre-patches into "fixes"
for real bugs and "improvements" for the other stuff (speed, new
drivers,...).
Another approach would be to put fixes with comments on www.linuxhq.com and
flag them as "Approved for next release". Probably this could even be a
separate section on linuxhq.




Ciao,
Franz.

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