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Stable releasesStable releasesPosted Dec 17, 2004 2:17 UTC (Fri) by mbp (guest, #2737)In reply to: Quote of the week by mrshiny Parent article: Quote of the week
There is a stable release: 2.6.8.1 works great for me. (ymmv) I'm going to stick with it until I need a new driver, or I get bored. The same strategy can work for you: find something that works, then quit fiddling. If you want stability, stop upgrading.
Having a stable release series is not meaningful when the user community is as diverse as for the kernel: what works well for you may be inadequate for someone else. Maybe you need support for new hardware, but to me that's just dangerous churn. Who gets to decide what is critical enough to go into the stable stream?
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Stable releases Posted Dec 17, 2004 13:03 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link] This is why the kernel needs a stable release, and drivers need to bereleased separately. If the kernel itself is working for you, you don't upgrade it. But if your drivers are inappropriate, you get new ones, and install them on your older kernel. Unfortunately we can't do that in the linux world because the kernel developers have decided (rightly or wrongly) that they don't want to support that use-case. Why should I need to upgrade my whole kernel to get a network card working? What if that network card is newer than my kernel, and the driver only exists on a newer kernel that doesn't have the same driver api? I am out of luck; even though my kernel works fine, I want to upgrade a single component in my whole computer but I now have to upgrade the whole kernel, and ALL the device drivers. What if a device driver I used to use is now broken? It's happened in the past.
Stable releases Posted Dec 17, 2004 20:11 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] This is why the kernel needs a stable release,Exactly. However, some of the discussion here seems to suggest that Greg and his peers should provide it. There's simply no reason to expect that. Instead, we need distributors, whom we pay to give us what we need, to provide a stable release. They can take high-reward low-risk changes from kernel.org and add those, and they can skip compatibility-busting changes (or, more likely, make the minor modification required to make the change backward compatible). Since distributors used to get a lot more free help with that from kernel.org (via the e.g. 2.4 "stable" series) than they do now, I'm still waiting to see if they step up to that responsibility with 2.6-based kernels.
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