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SubjectRe: Shortening the Development Cycle... [maybe OffTopic, flame-bait?]
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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