Re: starting with 2.7

[Paolo Ciarrocchi]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 03:06:25 +0100, Roman Zippel <zippel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Monday 03 January 2005 14:24, Diego Calleja wrote:
> 
> > I fully agree with WLI that the 2.4 development model and the
> > backporting-mania created more problems than it solved, because in the real
> > world almost everybody uses what distros ship, and what distros ship isn't
> > kernel.org but heavily modified kernels, which means that the kernel.org
> > was not really "well-tested" or it took much longer to become "well-tested"
> > because it wasn't really being used.
> 
> Backporting isn't the primary problem. The real problem were the huge time
> intervals between stable releases. A new stable release brings a huge amount
> of changes which got different levels of testing, which makes upgrading quite
> an experience.
> What we need are regular releases of stable kernels with a manageable amount
> of changes and a development tree to pull these changes from. It's a bit
> comparable to Debian testing/unstable. Changes go only from one tree to the
> other if they fulfil certain criteria. The job of the stable tree maintainer
> wouldn't be anymore to apply random patches sent to him, but to select
> instead which patches to pull from the development tree.
> This doesn't of course guarantees perfectly stable kernels, but it would
> encourage more people to run recent stable kernels and avoids the huge steps
> in kernel upgrades. The only problem is that I don't know of any source code
> management system which supports this kind of development reasonably easy...

It really makes sense.
vanilla and -mm are already a kind of stable/unstale tree though.

-- 
Paolo
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