Re: Standard Development Integration

From: Marco Colombo (marco@esi.it)
Date: Thu Jan 13 2000 - 05:47:26 EST


On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Horst von Brand wrote:

> Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 09:21:00 -0300
> From: Horst von Brand <vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl>
> To: Marco Colombo <marco@esi.it>
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
> Subject: Re: Standard Development Integration
>
> Marco Colombo <marco@esi.it> said:
> > On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Horst von Brand wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > > Calling the current 2.3 2.4 won't make it stable. And nobody wants the 2.0
> > > fiasko again: Let 2.3 mature before it gets to be 2.4, and let's hope for
> > > at most 2.4.12 or so (like we are getting with 2.2).
>
> > Agreed. I'm not saying to make the move tomorrow. I'm just saying to
> > make the todo list as shorter as possible, by removing items, and have it
> > stable as soon as possible.
>
> That is what they are doing right now...

See the 'First draft list of 2.3.x "Things to fix"' thread.
Alan really meant "things to fix", but it quickly became "things to do".
They mentioned Ext3 and ReiserFS. Both are not broken, and they don't
need to be 'fixed'. They need something to be designed and implemented
somewhere else in the kernel (VM, i think). As Linus stated, not a 2.3
thing at all. I also think that RAID 0.90 needs to be 'ported', not 'fixed'.
It *works* on 2.2.x. It's a stable and complete piece of software.

> [...]
>
> > > [Proposal to "just get out unstable stuff" gets us nowhere fast]
>
> > Yup. I just wonder why there's so much work to be done. My answer is that
> > 2.3 came out too late, with many people developing on 2.2. So they've been
> > late with 2.3.
>
> Because many things changed, like USB (many different ways to connect a
> devices, many copies of same, hotplugging, ...). Others where broken and
> slated for rework (SCSI), and bugs (both ancient and new) surfaced. New
> drivers have been integrated, PCI (and bus handling in general) was redone
> for hotplugging.

That's fine. They are all changes that were made to kernel as a part of
its evolution. All of them are welcome. Some of them are new features,
some are better implementations of previous ones. 2.3 is a changing kernel,
as it was supposed to be. So far, so good.
But other new features were added to 2.2. 2.2 is a changing kernel and
it was NOT supposed to be. Right, this new features do not belong to
the official tree. But they are there, and some of them are even stable and
complete. What is the status of RAID 0.90 or ReiserFS, as 2.2-based features?
AFAIK, if work has to be done on RAID 0.90, it's just to port it to 2.3.
AFAIK, ReiserFS works well and it's quite complete, on 2.2.
Both are included (as an option? - i'm not sure) in kernels included
in some major distributions (RedHat for RAID and Suse for ReiserFS, at least).

I don't believe it was just a mistake of their authors to develop them
against 2.2 instead of 2.3. It happened because 2.3 was not there at
the right time (for them). It happened because 2.3 was not there for
months after 2.2 was released (or entered its 'no more features' phase).

> --
> Horst von Brand vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl
> Casilla 9G, Viņa del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616
>

.TM.

-- 
      ____/  ____/   /
     /      /       /			Marco Colombo
    ___/  ___  /   /		      Technical Manager
   /          /   /			 ESI s.r.l.
 _____/ _____/  _/		       Colombo@ESI.it

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