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New Linux Kernel Development Process
An anonymous reader writes "Releasing the 2.6.13-rc4 Linux Kernel, Linus Torvalds announced an improved development process to try and minimize the number of bugs in the kernel. The general idea is simple: changes will only be allowed for two weeks after the release of a stable kernel. All the rest of the time between releases will be spent on fixing bugs. This should improve upon last year's development module, which allows for active development in the 2.6 stable kernel."
This seems to put more pressure on individual distro vendors to add features and test them, then discuss their inclusion in the upstream kernel. Seems pretty reasonable to me. This should definitely stabilize the kernel a lot.
Which is also, btw, what people say they want from MS and Windows.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
A developer doesn't have 2 weeks to insert new functionality. A developer can work on enhanced performance or new features for 9 months, but there is a 2-week window after each release in which patches will be accepted.
The two things are orthogonal.
We'd better hope everyone's patches are orthogonal too. If five Linux kernel developers all spend 9 months working independently on patches which turn out to make conflicting changes to the same subsystems, then after 2 weeks there will be one happy developer with his patch in the Linux kernel and four unhappy developers deciding whether to fork Linux or switch to FreeBSD.
Of course, to avoid such problems we can assume that those many different kernel developers are not working independently, but are committing changes to a single unstable kernel to share those changes and prevent conflicts. In that case, let's just call the new unstable kernel "2.7" and return to the system that was working so well for years.
Linus says a lot of things. It seems to me that he is just using the scientific approach, and trying new ways of doing stuff to see what works best. Some ideas are good, others are bad. But if you never change your process, you'll never find out.
These changes in the process make a lot of people scream whenever they happen. That's because people doesn't like change. Even now, people are screaming about breaking the odd/even process (which didn't work too well), even though the 2.6 process has worked much better. If the 2.6.13 process isn't even better, Linus will scrap it and try something else (such as going back to the old 2.6 process, or the 2.6.x.y process, or something else new, or whatever).
Stay calm! The world isn't going to end! All these changes mostly affects kernel developers, and even then, mostly those in the "inner circle". Your redhat/ubuntu/suse/whatever will still work just fine.