Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: 2.2 missing features | Date | Mon, 19 Oct 1998 09:55:07 +0200 | From | Philip Blundell <> |
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>Agreed. I know some very nice features that didn't make it into 2.1 >because the authors were "doing [their] development on 2.0 and don't >want to deal with 2.1 as well". This is the tail wagging the dog, >folks.
I've been in that position myself, as well as the reverse one. There are valid reasons why people may want to work on 2.0. In particular
- if you're writing some new driver or piece of code you don't necessarily want the rest of the kernel changing underneath you all the time as is wont to happen with 2.1. Choosing a particular 2.1 release and sticking with it is no good because then you have the worst of both worlds -- your code won't go cleanly into the latest kernels, and the codebase you're working from isn't as well tested as the 2.0 one.
- once your driver is finished and you want to deploy it in production, you may not want to have to run 2.1 kernels just so that you can support your new ethernet card. Although I might be happy to run 2.1 in a production system right now, six months ago I was a lot more nervous. (In fact we did it anyway and nothing bad happened, but...)
If someone is starting Linux development for the first time then it's a lot less intimidating if they can start from a "stable" kernel.
p.
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