Greetings to All,
Over the past few months, I've been listening in on LKML, with occasional,
minor comments - mostly to help newbies. Now, I think it's time for a
suggestion ...
As we all know, several of the recent releases have had defects that have
__required__ patches before they could be built (or used safely). Problems
with symlinks, loopbacks, and unmount come to mind as being like
this. They are all show stoppers that required immediate fixes and the
creation of a new release or of the next -pre1 version.
I have a tendency to tink that it's better to be running a released kernel,
than a pre-release kernel. I'd much rather be running a kernel named 2.4.x
than a kernel named 2.4.y-pre?. With the recent problems, the working
versions tend to be the -pre1 or -pre2 releases, not the released
one. With a bit of QA, I think we can have 2.4.x releases be the stable
releases. Here's how...
When the kernel maintainer, now Marcelo for 2.4, is ready to release the
next kernel, for example 2.4.16, I suggest he switch from "pre?" to "-rc1"
(as in release candidate). A day or two with -rc1 will quickly show if it
has a show stopper. If so, then the minor fixes (and nothing else) go into
-rc2. A day or two ..., and either -rc3 appears or we have a stable
release and 2.4.16 is ready to be released.
Let's go the extra distance and have the releases be usable, stable
kernels! It's what users want and it's within the abilities of the
developers to produce. Let's do it :-)
David
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 30 2001 - 21:00:18 EST