Re: A users thoughts on the new dev. model

[H. Peter Anvin]

Followup to:  <cdpee5$otu$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
By author:    Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> 
> I confess I feel that this new model is a return to the bad old days 
> when the stable tree wasn't. Sounds as if Andrew is bored with the idea 
> of letting 2.7 be the development tree and just being the gatekeeper of 
> STABLE new features for 2.6. Perhaps 2.7 should be opened and Andrew 
> will have a place to play, and features can drift to 2.6 more slowly.
> 

I think the discussion we had at the kernel summit has been somewhat
misrepresented by LWN et al.  What we discussed was really more of a
"soft fork", with the -mm tree serving the purpose of 2.7, rather than
a hard fork with a separate maintainer and putting ourselves in
back/forward-porting hell all over again.

Note that Andrew's -mm tree *specificially* has infrastructure to keep
changes apart and thus backporting to 2.6 mainstream of patches which
have proven themselves becomes trivial.

Thus:

	- Andrew will put experimental patches into -mm;
	- Andrew will continue to forward-port 2.6 mainstream fixes to
	  -mm;
	- Patches which have proven themselves stable and useful get
	  backported to 2.6;
	- If the delta between 2.6 and -mm becomes too great we'll
	  consider a hard fork AT THAT TIME, i.e. fork lazily instead
	  of the past model of forking eagerly.

Why the change?  Because the model already has proven itself, and
shown itself to be more functional than what we've had in the past.
2.6 is probably the most stable mainline tree we've had since 1.2 or
so, and yet Linus and Andrew process *lots* of changes.  The -mm tree
has become a very effective filter for what should go into mainline,
whereas the odd-number forks generally *haven't* been, because
backporting to mainline has usually been an afterthought.

I for one welcome our new -mm overlords.

	-hpa
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