Kernel Summit: Development process [LWN.net]

Kernel Summit: Development process

Posted Jul 21, 2004 4:39 UTC (Wed) by hp (subscriber, #5220)
Parent article: Kernel Summit: Development process

The following works very well for GNOME, three releases have come out on time and with better quality than with the previous feature-based model:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-June/msg00041.html

Key points are:
- time based
- concept of "active stream" people are using
- forced feature freeze on stable branch
- always dogfoodable unstable branch
- the timeline and rules are the same every iteration,
so there's never confusion or big discussions about the
release process

If the unstable branch is reliably going to stabilize and release, people can work on it instead of destabilizing the stable branch while the unstable branch becomes a research project.

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Kernel Summit: Development process

Posted Jul 21, 2004 5:32 UTC (Wed) by jamesm (guest, #2273) [Link]

The resarch branch idea sounds like one of the ideas that Linus mentioned, where 2.7 would be only for really strange/radical things.

Perhaps you could post a summary of the Gnome experience to lkml after the conference.

Kernel Summit: Development process

Posted Jul 21, 2004 18:59 UTC (Wed) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

Ah, I meant the "research project" to be a bad thing. ;-)
The unstable branch should be dogfoodable...