Whatever happened to the feature freeze?

[Posted December 18, 2002 by corbet]

While most people seem to think that the new system call mechanism makes sense, the question has come up: what kind of feature freeze are we in if we're adding things like a whole new way of doing system calls? Alan Cox, perhaps, had the most direct comment:

Linus. you are doing the slow slide into a second round of development work again, just like mid 2.3, just like 1.3.60, ...

Given the high hopes that have been placed on this feature freeze actually working, this sort of remark is something to be concerned about.

Linus has acknowledged the concern, and started a discussion on how patches should be reviewed. Looking ahead:

I thought about the code freeze require buy-in from three of four people (me, Alan, Dave and Andrew come to mind) for a patch to go in, but that's probably too draconian for now. Or is it (maybe start with "needs approval by two" and switch it to three when going into code freeze)?

There seems to be fairly widespread agreement, however, that this approach could be overly bureaucratic for now. Each development kernel release still contains hundreds of patches (636 for 2.5.51; in 2.5.52 there were "only" 153); people are understandably nervous about having that many patches go through a committee. Or even worse, being on the committee. Of course, Larry McVoy has an elaborate approach involving BitKeeper all planned out, but, given that a couple of people on the short list don't use BitKeeper, things will probably not go that way.

Andrew Morton has suggested simply adopting a set of guidelines for what can be accepted. The suggested list:

Bug fixes
Speedups
In-progress features (or those Linus had already said would be merged)
New drivers or filesystems

Anything outside of that list would not be included at this point. As the freeze gets harder, items are dropped off the list, until only bug fixes are left.

Given everybody's time constraints, the relatively informal approach is the most likely one to be adopted at this point. The important thing, in the end, is that everybody agrees that the feature freeze is important and is keeping an eye out for violations. As long as that continues, things will hopefully not get too far out of control.