Is the kernel development process broken? [LWN.net]

Is the kernel development process broken?

Posted Mar 9, 2005 18:57 UTC (Wed) by pm101 (guest, #3011)
Parent article: Is the kernel development process broken?

I'd much rather if they periodically 'froze' some 2.6 version, so we'd get 2.6.10.x, and that'd be updated until it, and a replacement version, reached stability (rather than when when the next 2.6.x comes out). Once 2.6.10.24 was considered "stable," we'd freeze another 2.6 (probably around 2.6.22 or something), and we'd maintain both 2.6.10.x and 2.6.22.x. Once 2.6.22.x reached stability, we'd discontinue 2.6.10.x, and move on to maintaining 2.6.22.x and 2.6.48.x. This way, at every point in time, we'd have at least one known-stable kernel. I'd also do a minimum of 6 months of maintanance on a kernel before it was considered known-stable.

I'm interpolating from between this article and a previous one on kerneltrap, so I might be out-of-date on what they're doing.

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Frozen kernels

Posted Mar 9, 2005 20:09 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I'd much rather if they periodically 'froze' some 2.6 version, so we'd get 2.6.10.x, and that'd be updated until it, and a replacement version, reached stability

That is just what major distribution makers do. They pick some kernel as baseline (presumably after evaluating it for stability) and keep patching it until the next revision of the distro is released, and even after that in distributions (like RHEL) that have a long supported lifetime.