Some movements in the kernel community

[Posted August 8, 2006 by corbet]

When Linus announced the 2.6.18-rc4 release, he tossed in one extra bit of news:

Anyway, I'll be effectively offline for most of the following three weeks (vacations and a funeral), and while I hope to be able to update my tree every once in a while, I also asked Greg KH to maintain a git tree for any worthwhile fixes.

He then promptly fled the scene without actually putting -rc4 up on kernel.org - an omission which Greg fixed some hours later. While kernel development will continue as always, we are likely to see rather fewer -rc releases over the next few weeks, and almost certainly no 2.6.18 final release.

Andrew Morton, meanwhile, used the 2.6.18-rc3-mm1 announcement to pass on a little news of his own:

fwiw, I recently took a position with Google.

He evidently made this change to find a working environment which better suits his habits; from the kernel development point of view, no real changes are expected.

Finally, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced a transition in 2.6.16 support:

This is just a notice to everyone that Adrian [Bunk] is going to now be taking over the 2.6.16-stable kernel branch, for him to maintain for as long as he wants to.

He will still be following the same -stable rules that are documented in the Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt file, but just doing this for the 2.6.16 kernel tree for a much longer time than the current stable team is willing to do (we have moved on to the 2.6.17 kernel now.)

Adrian had announced his intention to maintain this kernel for the long haul early in the 2.6.16 cycle. It will be interesting to see how this goes; fitting important patches into 2.6.16 will get harder as the mainline gets more distant. The long-term success of this project may depend on whether distributors make use of this kernel - and, as a result, help to maintain it.