Re: starting with 2.7

From: Willy Tarreau
Date: Tue Jan 04 2005 - 15:44:13 EST


On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 11:57:25AM -0800, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 05:53:01PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > My opinion is to fork 2.7 pretty soon and to allow into 2.6 only the
> > amount of changes that were allowed into 2.4 after 2.5 forked.
> > Looking at 2.4, this seems to be a promising model.
>
> This must be considered relative to the size of the source code.
> Just because they're more changes than you can personally track does
> not mean they're large numbers of changes relative to the source's size.
>
> Users' timidity in these regards should be taken as little more than
> a sign that the scale of the kernel's source is increasing, which is a
> good thing, as the kernel may then benefit from economies of scale.
>
> The kernel's scale has long since increased beyond the point where an
> individual can effectively track its changes in realtime, and small
> matters of degree such as are being moaned about now are insubstantial.
> Similarly, counts of bugs and regressions should probably also be
> considered relative to the size of the kernel source.

William, I strongly agree with you regarding this (fortunately, it seems to
happen sometimes :-))

Speaking for myself, I read and try to understand *all* the changelog of 2.4
pre releases, and even often take a look at linux.bkbits.net to see if some
things have changed, that I could grab before waiting for a release, but I
almost never read 2.6 changelog (except the first hundreds of lines that Linus
announces with a final release), because it's far too much. I don't even know
how some people still keep in touch with this amount of changes.

Cheers,
Willy

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