Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 29 Mar 2002 21:32:02 +0000 | From | Ruth Ivimey-Cook <> | Subject | Re: Request for 2.4.20 to be a non-trivial-bugfixes-only version |
| |
At 16:27 29/03/2002 +0000, Alan Cox wrote: >Its somewhat naiive. If you have a hole in a bridge and someone tells you >that for stability you can only paint the bridge and tighten bolts you will >still have a very broke bridge. Ditto with software. > >2.2.20 is stable because its been slowly refined to that and is now at the >point where on the hole the painting and bolt tightening is all that needs >doing. The 2.4 tree suffered serious earthquake damage in 2.4.10 which >hasn't entirely been fixed yet.
Please note I didn't say .20 *and all future versions*. I asked because it just seems to me that while kernel 2.4 is definitely improving, it is being pulled hard in 2 directions -- towards stability and towards 2.5.
I was hoping that, if we had a release that was focused on stability, the current code base might get a longer testing phase, resulting in a better code base overall.
I have been involved in professional software engineering for many years -- I know how things go and how basic structure affects things. However, I also know (from my own experience) that bug fixing is not nearly as exciting as developing some new feature, or getting a chunk of code "just right", when it worked ok to begin with. My commercial experience is that, at the end of a project, introducing significant changes of any type is something you do rarely and with great care; even the best engineer sometimes misses an important side-issue and messes up.
I guess I might be digging a hole here, but I'm trying hard to make Linux better for us all.
Ruth
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |