Guessing Linux 2.6.0 Release Date

thorgil writes "Guessing about the linux-2.6.0 release date is hard, but here is a new angle (pseudo-scientific): I made a graph (gif) based on errors/warnings from John Cherry's (OSDL) compile statistics for linus' linux bitkeeper tree. My guess is around 12th October, 2003. What is your guess and more important, why?"

Comments

Re:My guess

[Berzelius]

He *is* a student you know.

Re:July 13

[Shisha]

I'm waiting for a test* kernel with working software suspend. I've tried test2 and that didn't work, test3 worked about 2/3 times and so maybe test4 will be OK. There are mdk packages out there with test4 so maybe I'll give it a try.

Re:beta testers

[SpaceLifeForm]

Ummm, the Kernel Bug Tracker as previously discussed here?

still some big issues

[drago]

I don't think it will happen during the next 6 weeks, there are still some major things to be done. IDE still does not work as module (some circular dependencies in symbols), ISDN is still somewhere between the no longer working old model and the not yet complete CAPI support, just to name two.

Re:Question

[wo1verin3]

>> Does it still use the SCO licensed code in it ?

'still' would mean that it did in earlier versions. This has not been proven, and based on all of the information we have seen (as in code presented in that PowerPoint slideshow) does not lead to the conclusion that the 2.4 kernel contains any code that is 'owned' by SCO.

Re:Support the Protest Against Patents...

[4lex]

I disagree. Mainstream media will echo the protest (I don't know about TV, but "El Mundo" is a mainstream newspaper in Spain, and its digital edition) talks about the issue today, as it did yesterday.

Mainstream media like statistics. If important sites like Slashdot join the protest, they can safely add some more thousand affected users to the stats, and the protest becomes more important in the eyes of the public - thus, more important to the politician.

Re:Gifs are bad!

[Zenki]

But then again, gifs and pngs are still better for line art. chunking the image into 8x8 blocks doesn't make sense for charts and low color images. In these scenarios, it's better to just use gif/png.

Re:Stable version?

[ndogg]

I, myself, have not tested out the test release, but a lot of people that claim to have done so are saying that it's pretty stable already.

Re:Gifs are bad!

[dossen]

according to the FSF gif will be patented technology in at least one country (Canada) until Wednesday 7 July 2004.

since ADA

[ShaggyZet]

Not that I think it's the greatest language or anything, but my experience with ADA was that vastly more stupid things that programmers (in this case me) do show up as compile time errors. Almost to the point where if a program compiled it was bug free. Of course it's still possible to have a logical errors, but whole classes of what would be run time errors in C are compile time errors when ADA is properly used with things like range checking.

Re:since ADA

[javamutt]

Philosophically I think rewriting in Ada *would* benefit the kernel. Unfortunately the social issues around Linux would outweigh the technical benefits.

Ada was designed for large scale distributed software engineering, and in this case would be a much better language for global Linux kernel development.

Most of the "PITA" associated with Ada is its strict typing. You simply can't accidently perform innapropriate type operations in Ada without compiler warnings. It's also more verbose than many languages, but the verbosity is all aimed at making the code more intuitive.

I realize that most people don't know Ada, and having a large body of developers under a common language is a key element, so in the case of Linux it's probably not practical. But in Ada's defense I wanted to point out that it's "pain" isn't by careless design; It's more of a language for software engineering than hacking. Everything has its niche.