Messages in this thread | | | From | Roman Zippel <> | Subject | Re: starting with 2.7 | Date | Tue, 4 Jan 2005 03:06:25 +0100 |
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Hi,
On Monday 03 January 2005 14:24, Diego Calleja wrote:
> I fully agree with WLI that the 2.4 development model and the > backporting-mania created more problems than it solved, because in the real > world almost everybody uses what distros ship, and what distros ship isn't > kernel.org but heavily modified kernels, which means that the kernel.org > was not really "well-tested" or it took much longer to become "well-tested" > because it wasn't really being used.
Backporting isn't the primary problem. The real problem were the huge time intervals between stable releases. A new stable release brings a huge amount of changes which got different levels of testing, which makes upgrading quite an experience. What we need are regular releases of stable kernels with a manageable amount of changes and a development tree to pull these changes from. It's a bit comparable to Debian testing/unstable. Changes go only from one tree to the other if they fulfil certain criteria. The job of the stable tree maintainer wouldn't be anymore to apply random patches sent to him, but to select instead which patches to pull from the development tree. This doesn't of course guarantees perfectly stable kernels, but it would encourage more people to run recent stable kernels and avoids the huge steps in kernel upgrades. The only problem is that I don't know of any source code management system which supports this kind of development reasonably easy...
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