Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo
Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo
Posted Feb 16, 2021 8:28 UTC (Tue) by matthias (subscriber, #94967)In reply to: Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo by LtWorf
Parent article: Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo
>> This level of effort from a library maintainer is reasonable to expect - but it would be unfair to ask that maintainer to do QA on all the packages that depend on their package to confirm the lack of breakage. They may not even know how some their dependencies are supposed to behave, so noting that they're not behaving correctly after the patch has been applied would be very difficult indeed.
> That's basically the opposite of Torvald's approach :D
No, it is exactly Torvalds' approach. The kernel policy is no regressions, yes. But Torvalds does not do the QA for all software that runs on linux. That would be simply impossible. He releases -rc versions of the kernel and asks everyone to test. If regressions are reported, the corresponding patches are reverted (or improved). But it is the job of the users (distros, cloud service providers, etc.) to do the testing and validation.
> That's basically the opposite of Torvald's approach :D
No, it is exactly Torvalds' approach. The kernel policy is no regressions, yes. But Torvalds does not do the QA for all software that runs on linux. That would be simply impossible. He releases -rc versions of the kernel and asks everyone to test. If regressions are reported, the corresponding patches are reverted (or improved). But it is the job of the users (distros, cloud service providers, etc.) to do the testing and validation.
And it is definitely up to the distros to test whether a new kernel version works for them before they include it into the distribution.
The main difference between the kernel and many other projects is, that the kernel developers care much more about the regression reports received from the users and that regression reports have higher priority than new features.