Long-term support and backport risk [LWN.net]

Long-term support and backport risk

Posted Jun 21, 2007 16:48 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Long-term support and backport risk by dlang
Parent article: Long-term support and backport risk

Actually I did gloss over the issues of major changes in the 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4 series (2.4.9->2.4.14.. actually 2.0.10, 2.2.10 all were areas of instability). In most cases they were usually the kernel people seeing that something was majorly borked in their assumptions and having to retrofix a lot of stuff that they didnt make assumptions for. However from the items that LWN has shown on the kernel pages.. the amount of code changes in those series for a period of 2-4 sub-releases was less than what occurs between 2.6.20 and 2.6.21 or 2.6.14 and 2.6.15.

[From someone who has done systems administration support of kernels from 1993.]

(Log in to post comments)

Long-term support and backport risk

Posted Jun 21, 2007 23:53 UTC (Thu) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

there is no question that the rate of change has increased drasticly.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 2.6.21->2.6.22 changes riveled or exceeded the 1.2.0 -> 1.3.0 changes. the fact that it's happening so quickly with so few problems is amazing.

when I referred to the problems in the 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4 series, I wasn't just thinking of the couple major problems, I'm remembering that there were several 'brown paper bag' releases scattered throughout the series