Andrew Morton on kernel development

I think there's a substantial difference to the way he phrased the suggestion here from what
I've seen before. People tend to think of a bugfix-only release as one in which the mainline
only merges bugfixes. Simply making that policy would almost certainly lead to no more
bugfixes than usual, and twice as many features hitting the following release window.

On the other hand, if the process were driven from the other end, it might work: spend some
period collecting a lot of unfixed bugs, and saturate developers' development time with them,
and, in the cycle after that, there ought to be a lot of bugfixes and no new features, simply
because all that will have matured at the merge window will be bugfixes.

So, if there were a period where there was a campaign to collect long-standing bugs and
regressions against non-recent versions, with the aim of having all of these get resolved in a
particular future version, as the main goal for that release, I think that would be useful.