Slashdot Mirror
Robert Love, Preemptible Kernel Maintainer Interviewed
Tom F writes: "LinuxDevices did an interesting interview with Robert Love, the maintainer of the Linux preemptible kernel along with MontaVista. It is an exciting read and has Robert's usual wit and insight."
Obviously, you want someone that knows the kernel really well and can maintain every part of it.
That person doesn't exist, not even Linus knows every part of the kernel inside and out.
You have to trust the maintainers of their parts of the kernel because as good as Linus, Marcelo, Alan, etc are they can't know all the gotchas, etc of all the drivers and different kernel subsystems.
Aren't you taking a good developer (who can maintain every part of the kernel) away from the newer versions of the kernel?
They don't have to do it if they don't want to or don't have the time. But with Alan's recent want to not maintain 2.4.x so he can work on other things seems to say how much time is really required for the maintenance of a kernel tree.
There are only so many developers, what happens if you run out?
I highly doubt there will ever be that many currently maintained kernel versions.
If you maintain different kernels, people say "OHMYGOD we are forking we will all DIE"
If you roll changes into a kernel and make it unstable, people say "OHMYGOD production kernel's not stable we will all DIE"
RTFA and lighten up. The patches are being considered for 2.5. They haven't been ruled out.
www.eFax.com are spammers
What in the heck do you think this IS? Many of the best students treat developing their coding and CS skills more like a musician or artist practicing and performing for many hours a day. It's a creative act, and can be very involving. Moreover, that level of involvement hones problem solving and practival skills that the "just a job" students can never hope to achieve.
I always wondered about students who didn't have any passion for the field. From what I've seen in both academia and industry, that "just a job" mentality reduces one's skills to "programming fodder", and would seem to be a pretty unenjoyable career.