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The 2.5 Kernel Tree And Alan Cox
Motor writes "It seems that (as everyone suspected), the 2.5 Linux kernel tree is close to opening. However, contrary to expectations, 2.4 will not be maintained by Alan Cox, but will instead be handled by Marcelo Tosatti. Thanks to Alan for all his hard work on 2.0 and 2.2."
Go read the linux-kernel mailing list archives; at least once every couple of months, someone tries to give Linus a 300K patch, and he rejects it. Linus wants *small* patches, which do specific things, or implement one new feature.
Essentially, the only reason NON-platform-specific stuff gets through faster is because it all goes to Alan Cox, who then stuffs them into his own tree (the -ac* patches). When he decides they're stable enough to pass on, he breaks them up into bite-sized pieces for Linus.
Is this partially do to his over-zealousness and/or fears concerning the DMCA?
It is a sad day, if US laws are scaring off foreign OSS coders.
Where's the new maintainer's weblog, so we can track how he's doing?
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Linux 2.4, maintenance and succession
Posted 2 Nov 2001 by alan
People will have been wondering about the 2.4 stable kernel progression. Various bizarre rumours in Byte seem to have generated a lot of discussion and rumour. Now that the people concerned are all agreed its time to put the entire roadmap out and make it clear.
Linus will be releasing a 2.4.14 and probably a 2.4.15 finishing off the VM stability work and other rough corners. At that point the 2.5 kernel tree will be opened. There is a lot stuff queued for 2.5. It isn't going to be possible or sensible to throw it all into 2.5.0. One of the tasks is to put changes together in the right order.
Marcelo Tosatti will be the head maintainer over the 2.4 stable kernel tree. This is not the giant change it may seem from the outside. The stable kernel management was and is a group effort. Marcelo and many others have been active in 2.2 and 2.4 stabilisation work. I'll be helping Marcelo with advice when he asks it, and working on feeding him the 2.4 relevant bits of the -ac tree.
I will not be dissappearing from the scene, although I might be a little less visible at times. There are various kernel projects I will be working on as well as spending more time concentrating on Red Hat customer related needs. I'm hopeful that spending more time closer to customers will help provide more insight into where 2.5 needs to be going.
David Weinehall did a great job on 2.0.39 when he took over 2.0 from me.I'm very confident that Marcelo will do a great job on 2.4.
Alan
- Tux
Your argument is not relevant. Religion or gun laws have very little direct impact upon kernel development (for the most part - we can all make up spurious arguments to try and show otherwise). Copyright law has a direct impact not just on the programmers in the country passing the law but also, in the case of the DMCA, on hackers in other countries.
Whether one agrees or disagees with Cox and his tactics, the poloitics involved are affecting the development of Linux (the OS and the kernel) and other Free Software.
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
In the *changelog*. Not the code.
Personally, I consider the change log as part of the code.
Was it irrelevant (i.e., was he refusing to put in an OOM-killer because of pro-life views)? No, it was an extrapolation of how the law is currently written and was directly related to the topic at hand (security).
Yes, it was irrelevent. He contrived an absurd scenerio just so he could make a political statement. Put it this way -- why did he do it? Because he was in legitimate danger? No, he did it because he wanted to publicize his political views. A change log is NOT for publicizing your views, no matter what they are.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
AC's has shown great skill in pulling together rapid/major changes. Clearly his help is needed with the 2.5 series more than 2.4. But there is also the part that people don't like to talk openly about which is: how much can other commerical GNU/Linux distributors claim that the offical kernel development is a puppet of Red hat?
:)
While AC has done a great job of judging the priorities of the Linux community as a whole over the priorities of Red hat, there is still the question of how much his employeement at RH effects him. Anotherwords, for example, Ext3/JBD is a kernel modification that Red hat is very much pushing. It now appears in all Red hat v7.2 kernels. Also, the Ext3/JBD modifications have appeared for a while in the AC patches. But if these modification started appearing in the 2.4 kernel, others might question if it is because it is truely ready to be in 2.4 or if Red hat is using their AC position to strong arm submittions. Clearly IBM and SGI would also like to see their file system additions in the vanilla 2.4 kernel series. Having to justify the addition of one over the other shouldn't have to be AC's job.
So, I believe Alan Cox is doing the best technical and *political* choice for the Linux community as a whole.
So Marcelo Tosatti is the new made man ? I thought the books were closed...
-Tony Soprano
Always has. Always will (I hope).
:). He also is a practical man in terms of software use. I.e. He still disputes Linus' edict that binary only kernel modules are alowed but at the same time he didn't force Telsa to switch to Linux right away. (She uses it now).
Most people don't know this but in the weekly kernel traphic he is usualy listed #1 in volume of messages. He also subscibes to and discuses important isues in many other places from slashdot.org to the kde-licensing mailing list.
BTW: Read his diary. That's how I found out that he is a GNU fundamentalist
Speaking of Telsa. Her site "The more accurate diary. Really." should be requird reading for anyone dateing a Linux geek with serius intentions towards that geek.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Fah, Kernel developers should do whatever the heck they want, and we should all be grateful. When you start paying Mr. Cox for his work then perhaps you might be able to gain some leverage over how he expresses his opinions. In the meantime, why should anyone listen to you?
Here's an idea. Why don't you code up something half as nifty as whatever Alan will code up over breakfast tomorrow, release it as Free Software for the world to see, and put in your Changelog that Alan is a wanker. Perhaps the people that use your software will care what you have to say.
As far as I am concerned Free Software is a perfectly good medium for espousing your political views. Especially since if you don't like Alan's views you can still use his excellent software without being subject to them.
OTH, Linus continues assuming is Alan the responsible (Spanish too).
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Avoiding jail is not being polical!
You may have the opinion that anything Alan does as a kernel developer/maintainer is not affected by the DMCA and will not result in charges from some over zelous DA, but I seriously doubt there are any lawyers out there that would back you up. There have to be quite a few court rulings before anyone will even have a feel for this.
One of the reasons that everyone calls DMCA bad law is it's total lack of boundaries. This makes it unpredictable law, subject to abuse. While you and I may feel that there would be no justification to jail someone because they worked on CD/DVD drivers that someone else could use to run DECSS(?) is no guarantee for Alan or anyone else that someone won't arrest them and see what the courts say.
Avoiding being someone's legal guinea pig is not being political.
The ext3 stuff is scheduled for merging soon. The VM is simply more important, and as of 2.4.14pre7 basically works (there are a couple of corner cases left where it fails) - and is much faster than the older Riel VM. That was a concluded experiment anyway
RH doesn't get to decide what I feed to Linus,and Linus wouldn't listen if they did. XFS is 2.5 material certainly. JFS I don't know - Im watching it with great interest.
Alan
The DMCA has nothing to do with this btw - and I think given 6 months the US courts will have given the congress the required slap around the head with a wet herring. Until then it pays to be careful
All uncensored change logs are on
http://www.thefreeworld.net for non US citizens. US citizens take their own chances
... how about if kernel maintainers started putting in comments about their pro-life stance, their pro-Christian religious views, or their pro-gun views ...
In my opinion, his comments were directly applicable to kernel development. Gun control, abortion, and Christian views on the otherhand, seem inapplicable to kernel development.
According to the DMCA, it is illegal to post information about such vulnerabilities, and he took steps necessary to protect himself from prosection under United States federal law should he ever set foot in that country.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
You know your a geek when a post by Alan Cox is more exciting to you than say, meeting the President.
Andrew
A tip for the Newbies, this is not the first time... Alan has left the project before, generally around the same time in the development cycle. I think Alan is really into the "Cutting edge" features, and once kernel development slows to the quibbling about minutae, as it has now, I really think it takes alot out of him.
Alan also seems to work on HIS kernel, and then let everybody use it. He never intended to be such a dominant voice, no matter how strong his opinions. I think when good technical discussions between he and Linus get publicized as being interminable rifts (which believe me they are not) he tends to step back, being the less media visible member and wanting to avoid the appearance of a disastrous controversy.
And quite frankly, how many of us work 6 months on our hobby and then take some time off?? I sure do...
Wait until the Kernel gets exciting again, AC'll be back.
~Hammy
nothing4sale.org
WindowsXP was crashing like a monkey driving a Pinto.
Anyone who's followed Alan Cox for a while would laugh at the notion that Alan could be a Red Hat puppet. The day he has a falling out with Red Hat, he'll instantly get a substantial amount of money from some other company. If anything, Alan's involvement in a company that has to support users makes him a better judge of many things than someone in Linus's more isolated position.
If Red Hat is pushing a particular technical direction for Linux, it's quite likely that the reason for the push is because of the expert opinions of the many kernel hackers that work for them as to which code is mature enough to support.
i totally agree.
my personal feeling is that all the work alan has put in on the kernel project _specifically entitles_ him to highlight some issue _directly relevant_ to continued linux development.
my policy-perspective, assuming a mythical world where linux is a company and i own it, is that political viewpoints should be expressly disallowed in the any part of the source tree, to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. in this case, his efforts are on-topic and don't qualify so much as an expression company-politics (like backstabbing and jibber jabber) or social-politics (like gun control or christianity) but deal specifically with intellectual-property-politics.
end of story.
as he is one of the helmsman of the linux community i applaud his efforts. that i can run entire companies and isp's, securely, with near 100% uptime without using a single windows server due to his (and the many others) efforts encourages me to listen when he speaks... not jump up and down about gun control.
besides, come on people!!! if you can't get an uncensored copy of the changelog with nothing more than a web/ftp client then you're in the wrong business!
Now that's just silly.
He'd be free to rip out the Andrea VM if he wanted; however, I believe his concern is not about the technical aspects of the new VM but the principles involved in making deep changes to a stable kernel.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Actually, the slowdown is a stupid locking bug I just haven't gotten around to fixing on the production server.
'Course that won't stop me from suing the perpetrator under the DMCA anyway, once I find out who he is.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I wanted to work more on other stuff. We both felt Marcelo was a great choice and Marcelo wanted to be 2.4 maintainer
2.4-AC stands for Alan Cox!!! And all this time I'd thought that it was a 2.4 kernel based on submissions from anonymous cowards...
Since you asked, and everyone else will want to know..
Here is some info on our new maintainer..
Marcelo works for Connectiva. He lives with "Rik". He looks like this.
His weblog is here.
His "homepage" area is here
And I gotta say.. impressive to get that level of responsibility at his age..
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Who would file a complaint to prosecute Mr. Cox under the DMCA? No one. Therefore, Mr. Cox's actions can only be viewed as themselves a troll, an unjustified insult.
Whether or not anyone would file a complaint to prosecute him, he would still be breaking the law, according to the advice he was given. I find it hard to criticise him for not breaking it, and even harder to justify the argument that he should have broken the law to avoid being insulting.
If you don't like the consequences of your laws, then pressure your elected representatives to change them.
why would someone want to maintain an old kernel?
It sounds boring to me... Adding new features should be more engaging then fixing bugs and pleasing users.
Ah, but you are forgetting that more people actually use the stable 2.4 kernel as part of many many distributions. Having the responsibility of maintaining this very important (and mission critical in many cases) kernel is right on par with making the next version. It's just a different kind of responsibility.
----- rL
Read his actual comment (like anyone on /. ever does that anymore). He's not getting out of kernel development, he's just not maintaining the stable series this time around. He says he's gonna be working on other kernel projects - a.k.a., he wants his shot at the fun in the devel tree :-)
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
Of Course, half the /. crowd will now start a campagn for Anonymous Coward for President.
;)
Actually, I think Alan would make a great president
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