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Andrew Morton on Kernel Hacking

Posted by Hemos on from the smart-people-often-say-smart-things dept.

Susie Denmark writes "Linux Format has a brief interview with Andrew Morton, the maintainer of the Linux kernel 2.6 tree. Andrew discusses the debates behind revision control systems (the BitKeeper and CVS), new kernel features and his own -mm tree. Will the issue of using RCSes in the kernel tree ever die down? Does it really matter?"

6 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. He may be maintaining the 2.6 tree... by brilinux · · Score: 4, Funny

    But what does he know about 2.7!!??

    1. Re:He may be maintaining the 2.6 tree... by slavemowgli · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually... he's not even maintaining 2.6. He's maintaining -mm, which is kind of like the development branch where patches get tested before being merged into mainline, but the vanilla 2.6 tree is maintained by Linus, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.

      --
      quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
  2. Gittish by minginqunt · · Score: 5, Informative

    > Will the issue of using RCSes in the kernel tree ever die down?

    Um, yes. It did so three months ago. It's called git.

  3. Wow by gowen · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm suprised he finds the time, given the heavy load of muck raking biographies that he manages to write.

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  4. rcs. by s4m7 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Will the issue of using RCSes in the kernel tree ever die down?

    It more or less has since they've replaced bitkeeper with git.

    Does it really matter?

    Well, it probably doesn't matter to you if you arent part of the tree-maintenance heirarchy, since individual developers don't need to use git directly to submit their patches, but the maintainers use them to keep track of who submitted what patches when, when they were merged, if they were tweaked etc. Many maintainers were uncomfortable with BitKeeper because it was a proprietary platform meaning that they could go out of buiness, revoke linus's liscence, or any number of other things could go wrong. That's exactly what happened and so git was created to replace it.

    using some kind of RCS/SCM solution is absolutely critical in a project as large as the linux kernel, if for no reason other than to have a history of where stuff came from. If they'd been using something from the get-go it would be a lot harder for SCO to make the claims that they have.

    --
    This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
  5. You What!! by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh. My. Gods. From TFA

    AM: Well, we never even used CVS. Before BitKeeper we basically weren't using anything - just a bunch of patches sitting on Linus' hard drive and it uploaded occasionally. We had no tracking of what had gone in the kernel at all.

    Someone, please tell me this is a dream. Wake me from this nightmare. Dear gods!! There was no version control on the Linux Kernel!? How? What? When? Where? Why? WTF!!?

    I am not rightly able to comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that would provoke such a situation.

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!