Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 10 Sep 1999 08:42:05 -0700 (PDT) | From | Joe <> | Subject | Re: Shortening the Development Cycle... [maybe OffTopic, flame-bait?] |
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After looking thru this thread a bit, I may have a solution that may make everyone happy and only add a little (I hope) headache to the developers. So please don't flame me to bad, as I am not that sure how difficult this would be.
The issue seems to be how do we keep the stable kernels stable, yet keep porting back new features in to stable kernels from the developmental kernels, yet still decrease the development cycle.
Here is my proposal (reject it, flame it, I have a delete button too ..lol)
Maybe the stable kernls should not contain the new features by default. Just do fixes on the stable kernel and then rather than integrating the backports into the stable kernel by default, have them as "feature patches" (I think somone else suggested this too). Then someone who upgrade a stable kernel by default gets only bug fixes, and if they want extra or additional features then they can get extra patches for this feature. This would hopefully keep stable kernels stable. The feature patches would not have to be 'supported' under stable kernels, but woudl be worked on under development kernels.
As for development kernels: Deadlines. Why do you tink companies have them? So that they can say by this time such and such is done. Rather than useing a date, why not use a version number? Lets say 2.3.20 (pick one) . If you stuff is not in by that version number it does not get in this round. Then from 2.3.20 the kernel can be working on for fixes rather than new features. This means that hopefully by the time it reaches 2.3.25(?) it is stable enought to be released as 2.4. When 2.4 is released then 2.5 can start and stuff that was not in in 2.3.20 can go into 2.5. This should help reduce the development life cycle.
This is just my 2 cents, take it leave it but I'd personally rather have a stable 2.2 then new features and support for P3 optimizations. Some drivers can be added into the kernel without being a config option (vmware does this and cpia does this), so if the need for new drivers is an issue this is an option.
Joe
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