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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."
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.