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Where is the difffrence between doing a 2.6.x.y or 2.7.0

Posted Mar 9, 2005 18:22 UTC (Wed) by dambacher (subscriber, #1710)
Parent article: Is the kernel development process broken?

Why do they add a new dot-number to fix bugs but don't want to bump the secondary number?
e.g. do a 2.6.11.2 instead of a 2.6.x for stable and a 2.7 for new features?

For me it seems to be the same stable-unstable release cycle like it was with 2.4 and 2.5 kernels.

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Posted Mar 9, 2005 22:01 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

The main difference is that 2.6.11.y will stop when 2.6.12 is released, whereas 2.4.x, 2.2.x, and 2.0.x continue to get updates. The reason is that 2.6.12 shouldn't be so different from 2.6.11 that it has major new problems that can't be resolved quickly in a 2.6.12.y, so people encountering a bug in 2.6.11.last can switch to 2.6.12.latest to resolve it; seemingly, people don't switch from 2.4.x to 2.6.11 as soon as they run into a bug, so using the minor number is not really a suitable extension of history to date.