Stable releases [LWN.net]

Stable releases

Posted Dec 17, 2004 13:03 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266)
In reply to: Stable releases by mbp
Parent article: Quote of the week

This is why the kernel needs a stable release, and drivers need to be
released 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.

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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.