Re: Some thoughts about stable kernel development

[Krzysztof Halasa <khc@pm.waw.pl>]

Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org> writes:

>   - maintaining two trees is always more work than only one tree for the
>     same person, whatever the changes. This is obviously true, otherwise
>     none of us would ask for someone else to maintain the stable tree :-)
>     I believe this reason was given by both Alan and Marcelo at different
>     times.

Sure. However, with this scenario, the amount of additional work would be
low, as the time-consuming things are done once for both trees.

>   - I think it was Linus who said that clueless people will only use distro's
>     kernels, therefore are not affected by how the kernel is developped. And
>     for other people like us, the "stable" kernel will never contain enough
>     features and we will have to patch anyway.

Not sure about it - while I'm using 2.6.0test on my notebook (my personal
news/mail server + less important things), I also use official kernels
on some machines and patched trees on other ones.
What I _don't_ use is distribution kernel - not because it's bad, but
rather because i don't know it good enough.

>   - someone else (alan ?) said that even most obvious fixes can break some
>     setups, so there are not many "obviously riskless" patches around, and
>     if there's a really critical one which needs to go mainstream very
> quickly,
>     then the maintainer can always release a new version in a hurry and delay
>     -preX pending features for the next release.

-post, yes. But it only solves this one problem.
-- 
Krzysztof Halasa, B*FH