Linus Explains his Patch Policy

An anonymous reader writes "For everyone who has been wondering the method behind Linus's seeming madness of accepting or dropping patches, he has finally given a thorough explanation. A must read for anyone who wants to get their favorite feature into the next release of the kernel."

Comments

Summary

[jbolden]

Figured I'd post a quick summary of the underlying issue.

There is a patch that has strong vendor support (like vendors have already signed contracts involving services from this patch).
This patch is a service offered on many other commercial unixes (Irix, Solaris, AIX, etc..)
Linus considers this patch:
a) to be dangerous
b) to be difficult to test
c) likely to have the most problems on the x86 platform which is Linux's home platform
d) supporting it might add long term maintainability problems to the kernel

The kernel hackers whom Linus trusts seem to agree with his assessment.

What Linus wants is
a) for the vendors to support this patch over a long period of time on a wide range of systems.
b) For there to be some evidence that Linux users (as opposed to Linux vendors) actually want this feature.

So what you have is a fight between big guns: Suse, United Linux, IBM.. and Linus.

Of interest might be....

[Skeezix]

You might also find Havoc's article on Free Software Maintenance interesting.