Bug-squashing only releases [LWN.net]

Bug-squashing only releases

Posted Jul 13, 2006 2:46 UTC (Thu) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054)
In reply to: bug history; stability vs features by sanjoy
Parent article: Survey: Linux kernel quality

I'd like to see a bug-sqashing-only release and perhaps have it recur every odd minor number (e.g. 2.6.19 then 2.6.21 ...)

Well, considering that a 2.7 kernel has been roundly rejected, it appears that 2.6.x.y will be the value for the rest of time. Therefore, `2.6' no longer contains any useful information, and should be dropped, leaving kernel version numbers of `x.y', so the suggestion reduces to

I'd like to see a bug-sqashing-only release and perhaps have it recur every odd [...] number (e.g. 19 then 21 ...)

Hmmm, sound familiar?

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Bug-squashing only releases

Posted Jul 14, 2006 5:21 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

if the cycle was fast enough it wouldn't be a problem, however when the cycle got to multiple years between stable kernels the result was that kernels shipped by distros were significantly incompatable with each other.

right now they are haveing trouble keeping the cycle to a couple of months. give them a little time to stabilise that (and hopefully speed it up a bit) and then they can try a stabilization-only kernel without the preasure for other improvements being too big

even with the current cycle there are things being posted today that are being debated as 2.6.19 or 2.6.20 pushing those out to .22 or so is hard on the people developing the idea.

it's also frequently hard to draw a line between a fix and a new thing, in many cases the best fixes (long term anyway) are drastic departures from what was there before.