Date based [LWN.net]

Date based

Posted May 24, 2011 6:59 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: Date based by pflugstad
Parent article: 2.8.0?

How often do you actually want to know which year a kernel was released? I can't say I have ever done that.

It's mostly an excuse to have large version numbers, I think. What would be useful is information if a certain API is included, but that would not be very practical (imagine 2.6.nobkl.fuse.iwlwifi.etc...).

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Date based

Posted May 24, 2011 7:22 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, first of all kernel releases are time based. So normal version numbers make less sense than date based ones. That just valid and logical.

Kernel devs may not need the dates, but it would help consumers comparing products that ship with Linux inside. Most grandmas won't care, but geeks and "prosumers" will.
And lazy companies couldn't BS people with stuff like: "We support the 2.6 kernel"

My hope is that a date based scheme would put a little more pressure on companies to work upstream and ship recent kernels.

But as I already said: Red Hat, HP, Google etc won't like it and they at the end of the day pay the bills for most of people deciding this, so it won't happen.

Date based

Posted May 24, 2011 10:38 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

Well, first of all kernel releases are time based. So normal version numbers make less sense than date based ones. That just valid and logical.

Well, if Linus goes ahead with 3.0 then it's a date based system, as Linus says himself. Namely 3.x is the x'th release in the 3rd decade since Linux was born. Perhaps Linus just doesn't want to base his versioning on the birth date of some religious figure.. :-/

Also, perhaps Linus shouldn't base his versioning on such provincial time units as various stuff related to how fast the earth rotates around its own axis and the suns. I vote for megaseconds (Ms) since the epoch!

As to the question whether some group will find the kernel version numbering scheme easy to understand, or acceptable, or whatever: Those for whom the kernel version matters can certainly figure out whatever scheme is used (as long as higher number == newer), for the rest it doesn't really matter (does your PHB know the version number of the Windows kernel in his laptop? No, I didn't think so either)