Time for a Linux Bug-Fixing Cycle

AlanS2002 writes "As reported here on Slashdot last week, there are some people who are concerned that the Linux Kernel is slowly getting buggier with the new development cycle. Now, according to Linux.com (Also owned by VA) Linus Torvalds has thrown his two cents in, saying that while there are some concerns, it is not as bad as some might have thought from the various reporting. However he says that the 2.6 Kernel could probably do with a breather to get people to calm down a bit."

Comments

Re:I preferred the old odd/even split

[gowen]

I was wondering could someone explain to my why this (IMHO) good development model was abandoned in favour of continuous feature-adding in the 2.6 kernel?

It was very, very slow, (ironically, even Andrew Morton complained about this). This meant that desirable new features would be backported to the stable branch anyway, either in mainstream or vendor kernels (with all new bugs), which kind of defeated the object.

So it increased the workload, didn't seem to offer massive stability benefits (although, maybe it did, in retrospect), it reduced the amount of testing the new features got, and limited the workloads on which they were tested.

Personally, I find the present -stable branch of non-bleeding edge kernels to be as solid as 2.4 and 2.2 ever were. I do think we've a tendency to look back at that dev-cycle with rose-tinted glasses. It's not as if 2.4 or 2.2 were reasonably bug-free until the twentieth cycle or so.

Re:I preferred the old odd/even split

[Mr Z]

No, the 2.6.x.y are patch releases of 2.6.x. The development releases are 2.6.x-preY. The release candidates are 2.6.x-rcY.

Makes sense to me at least.

--Joe

Dave Jones take on the story

[greppling]

can be found in a post in his live journal. He reports that with every new kernel release, the number of kernel related bug reports in the Fedora bugzilla goes up substantially.

(Davej is a long time kernel hacker and currently the Fedora kernel maintainer.)

Re:Standardize the Kernel API!!

[EvilGrin666]

What the kernel really lacks is a good standard for coding practices, like say adding comments and indenting at least somewhat sensibly [yeah I know for some of you "elites" you can take reading a complete lack of consistent indentation but for the rest of us ...]

The kernel includes a document detailing the coding style to use. It lives in Documentation/CodingStyle.txt You can read the current version from Linus' Git tree here. If you spot anything in the kernel that doesn't follow CodeingStyle.txt you should submit a patch to the kernel janitors to fix it up.