Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 21 Jul 2004 19:33:31 -0600 | From | Mike Snitzer <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] delete devfs |
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Here is a portion of the story; hopefully posting a snippet will not offend John Corbet. You guys really should just subscribe to LWN.. the following is just a taste of the insight LWN has to offer:
<snip> Linus talked about how happy just about everybody is with 2.6. It has been almost two years since the alleged 2.5 feature freeze, but there still is no great pressure to start a new development series. Linus asks: could things just go on the way they are for a while yet, until enough pressure forms to force the 2.7 fork?
Bdale Garbee pointed out that, in the absence of a 2.7, many people will conclude that 2.6 has not yet stabilized sufficiently. There may be a need to do the fork just to convince people that 2.6 is ready. Alan Cox had a different idea: given that there is not a great deal of stuff to merge into 2.7, perhaps the developers could actually do a six-month release cycle for a change?
Andrew pointed out that, during the 2.6 process, he and Linus have been merging patches at a rate of about 10MB/month. There is, he says, no reason to believe that things will not continue that way. The traditional stabilization mechanism, where almost no patches are accepted for long periods of time, does not strike him as a good idea. Instead, Andrew would like to see a 2.6 tree which continues to change and evolve, and let the distributors do the final stabilization work. In his vision of the future, the kernel.org kernel will be the most featureful and fastest kernel out there, but it will not necessarily be the most stable.
The idea here is that restricting changes creates an incredible "patch pressure," which eventually leads to massive amounts of changes going into the kernel suddenly. At that point, things really do become unstable. It is better to keep the flow rate on patches higher; that keeps the developers happy and gets new code out to users quicker. Andrew really believes this: there are, seemingly, very few patches that he is not willing to accept into 2.6 - as long as they make sense and survive testing in -mm.
These patches include API changes, incidentally. Stable internal kernel APIs have never been guaranteed, but the developers have usually tried to not make big changes during a stable kernel series. That looks to change now. Among other things, it was said that API changes should be merged before an eventual 2.7 fork, since that would make synchronization between the two trees easier. Your editor, who really would like to see Linux Device Drivers not go obsolete before it hits the shelves, finds this idea somewhat dismaying.
What may happen is that Linus creates a 2.7 tree in the near future, but that tree will be restricted to truly experimental, destabilizing changes. This tree may have no future: if it doesn't work out, or can't be kept in sync with 2.6, it might simply be dropped. Or it could yet develop into 2.8, if that makes sense.
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:31:24 -0400, Brian Gerst <bgerst@didntduck.org> wrote: > Greg KH wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 12:02:38AM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > > >>>As for "right now"? Why not? I'm just embracing the new development > >>>model of the kernel :) > >> > >>Could anyone please explain this mysterious "new development model of > >>the kernel"? > >> > >>Is this some personal fight from you against Linus or someone else you > >>are trying to bring to linux-kernel, or WTF has happened??? > > > > > > No fighting is going on here. I know lwn.net has already reported about > > this, see there for details. I don't have the time to write it up right > > now due to being at OLS. > > > > thanks, > > Ok, is there anywhere else that isn't subscriber-only that has the scoop? > > -- > Brian Gerst > > > - > 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/ > - 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/
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