On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 12:34:09PM -0300, Horst von Brand wrote:
Thomas Graf <tgraf@xxxxxxx> said:
* Theodore Ts'o <20050104002452.GA8045@xxxxxxxxx> 2005-01-03 19:24
I was thinking more about every week or two (ok, two releases in a day
like we used to do in the 2.3 days was probably too freequent :-), but
sure, even going to a once-a-month release cycle would be better than
the current 3 months between 2.6.x releases.
It definitely satifies many of the impatients but it doesn't solve the
stability problem. Many bugs do not show up on developer machines until
just right after the release (as you pointed out already). rc releases
don't work out as expected due to various reasons, i think one of them
is that rc releases don't get announced on the newstickers, extra work
is required to patch the kernel etc. What about doing a test release
just before releasing the final version. I'm not talking about yet
another 2 weeks period but rather just 2-3 days and at most 2 bk
releases in between.
And most users will just wait the extra 2 or 3 days before timidly dipping
in. Doesn't work.
Some will start testing right away, others will wait 2 or 3 days
first. And that's fine. Not all 2.6.x kernels will be good; but if
we do releases every 1 or 2 weeks, some of them *will* be good. The
problem with the -rc releases is that we try to predict in advance
which releases in advance will be stable, and we don't seem to be able
to do a good job of that. If we do a release every week, my guess is
that at least 1 in 3 releases will turn out to be stable enough for
most purposes. But we won't know until after 2 or 3 days which
releases will be the good ones.