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No 2.7 Linux Kernel Branch Due Soon
An anonymous reader writes "At the fourth annual Linux Kernel Developers Summit, it was decided that there won't be a 2.7 Linux kernel development branch any time soon. Instead, Linux creator Linus Torvalds and the official 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton have decided to continue working as a team, further enhancing the 2.6 kernel. Up to this point, kernels ending in an odd number (2.1, 2.3, 2.5, etc) were considered development kernels, and kernels ending in an even number (2.2, 2.4, 2.6, etc) were considered stable kernels. However, according to this KernelTrap article, active development will now continue in the mainline 2.6 tree, and the final stabilization will be left up to the companies that provide Linux distributions."
we get stories for every kernel realease as it is, and now we get stories when there's *not* gonna be a kernel release?
what's next? a story on microsoft *not* putting out a new version of windows?...oh, wait...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
I'm sorry your forcedeth driver example is harsh. The driver is clearly labelled as "EXPERIMENTAL", and what's more it is *reverse engineered* because nvidia didn't want to give out the documentation to it. You are lucky someone was actually working on it at all.
As a sidenote, nvidia is now actually contributing to this very driver, however that has been since 2.6.7.
So this line of argument holds no water.
To everyone saying this will kill the independent distro, chill.
If you were going to make a new distro right now, in my opinion you'd be better off starting with Fedora or Progeny's Componetized Linux or vanilla Debian or something as it is, stand on some shoulders people. Linus and his crew produce a kernel, not an operating system, I'm sure they're doing this to produce the best kernel they can, not because they hate you.
Like other people said, 2.4 had so many changes go in during it's "stable" life, maybe their just trying to be realistic and make 2.6 actually be more stable than 2.4 this way?
It seems to me that everyone is assuming that there will never be a 2.7 tree. From the article, the simply quote Jonathan Corbet as saying that "2.7 will only be created when it becomes clear that there are sufficient patches which are truly disruptive enough to require it. When 2.7 *is* created, it could be highly experimental, and may turn out to be a throwaway tree."
They are just concentrating on the stable branch for now, and collecting a patch set (Andrew Morton's -mm patch set, that is) as a testing ground for proposed (stable) kernel changes.
This really doesn't seem like a big deal, and it implies that the kernel people will focusing on stability for the time being.