The newest development model and 2.6.14 [LWN.net]

The newest development model and 2.6.14

Posted Nov 3, 2005 22:01 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: The newest development model and 2.6.14 by malor
Parent article: The newest development model and 2.6.14

I agree that there are potential concerns there, but you seem to have a strange idea of the 2.4 and before days. At the time, no distro shipped anything similar to the vanilla kernel, and vendor software really only worked at all with a single distro, because dealing with the divergence in backported features, bugfixes, and external patches applied by distros really was too much to handle. (Of course, a certain portion of this was userspace divergence, where everyone had a different libc version and C++ ABI; but it was also true of the kernel). In particular, Oracle would only run on Red Hat, not on any vanilla kernel, and, IIRC, depended on a patch they'd done themselves which was only in Red Hat, because it was too intrusive to get into mainline 2.4. Part of the point of the change was so that, when something was made to work on today's Red Hat, it would work on next week's vanilla kernel, not only on the vanilla kernel in three years when something yet newer was needed. This requires that the kernel development cycle be significantly shorter than a product lifetime.

Really, I think the main useful improvement I could see would be to have a "why isn't 2.6.X being released yet" section on kernel.org, so developers can see what they could do to get to the next development cycle faster. The next thing I could see is having a QA period run by the -stable team when Linus is done with 2.6.X and opens 2.6.X+1. Then, perhaps starting the inclusion period for 2.6.X arbitrarily early, maybe even with a "preview" patchset so that interested people could see what's coming and test if they think they'll be affected (this would be a bit like -mm, but only include things proposed for inclusion in the next vanilla kernel). Two months is plenty of time if new code is already in good shape when it enters the process and there is effective testing and debugging during those two months. No amount of time is enough if nothing is getting done to improve things during the time.

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The newest development model and 2.6.14

Posted Nov 14, 2005 19:28 UTC (Mon) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

I missed this before, sorry.

My experience with Linux from about 0.8 through 2.4 was very simply this: I rolled my own kernel. Even when I was using a distro, I still rolled my own. I can't do that anymore.

And Debian shipped that way from the very start. They've had to change their procedures quite a bit, in fact, to cope with the steadily-decreasing reliability of the Linux kernel. They've had to do backporting of bugfixes and that sort of thing, where they used to just track either 2.2 or 2.4 vanilla. Even 2.4 wasn't good enough for Debian for a long time, and it's MUCH better than 2.6.

I feel bad for the 2.6 Debian maintainers.