Linux 3.0 Release Delayed

JustinRLynn writes "A recent Google+ Post by Linus Torvalds indicates that version 3.0 of the Linux kernel will have to wait due to the discovery of a 'subtle pathname lookup bug.' Linus indicates, 'We have a patch, we understand the problem, and it looks ObviouslyCorrect(tm), but I don't think I want to release 3.0 just a couple of hours after applying it.'"

Comments

Chicken?

[oldhack]

Release it now, you fool!

Re:Chicken?

[X0563511]

Project Manager: Did it build?
Developer: Yea, but we haven't even run the thing yet
Project Manager: Ship it!

Re:Chicken?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Your project managers make you get a completely clean build before you ship? How do you guys stay on schedule?

Re:Chicken?

[arth1]

Your project managers make you get a completely clean build before you ship? How do you guys stay on schedule?

Simple enough, Firefox style: Any time you get a semi-clean build, you tag it. When you release, you simply bump the version number of the last tagged build. So what if you don't get half the features - it's a new version, as witnessed by the version number!

Re:Chicken?

[topham]

And with the new policy they increment the major version number every time they hit 'Build'.

Re:Chicken?

[IB4Student]

Are you suggesting that the consumers should have to wait until, say, 10 total new features are complete before they can use the 4 new features that are already finished?

Re:Chicken?

[shentino]

I for one am glad a geek IS the project manager.

More focused on getting it right than meeting deadlines.

Re:Chicken?

[1s44c]

Project Manager: Did it build?
Developer: Yea, but we haven't even run the thing yet
Project Manager: Ship it!

There doesn't seem to be a mod for '+1 sad but true'.

Re:Chicken?

[Tubal-Cain]

No, but 0.x increments are perfectly reasonable. If they use only single-digit increments before rolling over the major release number; they'd average a major version number every two years (six to sixteen weeks between releases, right?)

Re:Chicken?

[Canberra Bob]

I for one am glad a geek IS the project manager.

More focused on getting it right than meeting deadlines.

That would explain why GNU/Hurd is such an excellent OS

Re:Chicken?

[shentino]

RMS isn't a geek. He's a fanatic.

Re:Chicken?

[shutdown -p now]

That's some bad release practice.

In a good Agile team, there's a build server churning out builds as developers work. So manager does not need to bother them with questions like that - he just ships the most recent rolling build with a few clicks when he feels like it. Agile is all about cutting the red tape! ~

Re:Chicken?

[leenks]

In a decent engineering environment, regardless of it being "agile" or not, I would hope that the decision was made to formally release to customers, and a branch was created for that release. After a short period of stabilisation (removal of critical bugs, but no more features) the most recent build from that branch can be released, while feature development has continued on master/trunk. All of those bug fixes can be merged back into master for mainline development.

Sure, you might provide canary/integration/every-stable-build-of-master-from-the-CI-system releases to stakeholders so they can track development and give feedback, but your releases need to be managed. How else are you ever going to support that release after your customers have got hold of it - ie supply bugfixes for it without forcing them to upgrade to a newer release that might contain masses of new features, bugs, and incompatible changes?

Re:Chicken?

[Migala77]

A policy first implemented by the Windows 95 development team

Re:Chicken?

[bill_mcgonigle]

You have good fortune if your test cases reflect all of the possible scenarios your customers might subject your software to. Most developers don't get to work with such a narrow constraint.

Re:Chicken?

[shutdown -p now]

Apparently I wasn't sufficiently sarcastic, since several people have already took that comment for real. That despite the ~ there.

Jeez, of course you don't just grab integration builds and release them, Agile or not! My post was only extending GP's idea to its logical "agile" pinnacle of absurdity.

Re:Chicken?

[horza]

RMS isn't a geek. He's a fanatic.

How are those mutually exclusive? And if somebody that writes a good chunk of emacs and gcc isn't a geek I'm not quite sure what your definition is. Ungrateful git.

Phillip.

Re:Chicken?

[SnarfQuest]

Their counter must be broken then. 95 to 98 to 2000 to 7 to 8. Are they using Intel chips, or do they go through so many versions that the counters reset?

Re:Chicken?

[GooberToo]

A number of months back I was trolled and trolled moderated at the very concept that anyone other than developers are typically responsible for late releases and buggy products. I fully expect a large number of people here literally had no clue your post was anything but serious - except for the fact it has been moderated funny.

Sad.

Re:Chicken?

[Kjella]

You don't come across a broken printer driver and say "Hey, I want to fix this. Where's the source code for it?" without being something of a geek. He wrote a Lisp interpreter, if that's not geeky then I don't know what is. I don't know how much of the GNU project he wrote himself, but I doubt he said "Everyone else you write the code, I'll lead." to get it started. And a life dedicated to software and source code, that sure sounds like a fanatic geek to me. Of course he's no Linus kind of geek, but then again most geeks couldn't fill his shoes if they tried. I mean I see a lot of ways RMS could have been the random irrelevant weirdo geek. He's still a weirdo, but the license he made and the relentless advocacy he did for it is pretty damn important. You can argue that he's not exactly talking well to corporations or the average joe, but apparently he convinced enough other geeks - like Linus - to use his license. And without code you don't have users at all, simple as that. He got the snowball rolling, even though he can hardly take credit for the whole avalanche.

I think he's said many stupid things, like his criticism of the Creative Commons licenses. His world is just extremely black and white. But on some things I think the critics are a bit unfair, like with DRM. It was obvious, however implied, that the idea of getting source code was to fix your device - in his original case, his printer. Not that someone else could make a different printer with that code, because the original printer wouldn't run any modified unsigned code. If he had been a little more precise when he wrote the GPLv2, it would have been covered as for him it's always about the user's freedom, not just the developer's freedom to use it for his own projects. That has been clear since he wrote about the "four freedoms" in 1986, long before the GPL. As such maybe he was a little lucky, because it doesn't seem Linus sees it that way and if he'd made that clear maybe Linus would have rejected his license. It wouldn't take much of a butterfly effect for it to all end differently...

Re:Chicken?

[X0563511]

No worries. It'll take more than a couple of misunderstood posts to effect it to the point where it bothers me.

Re:Chicken?

[DaVince21]

Chicken! Cheeep cheep cheep cheep!

Re:Chicken?

[IB4Student]

Simply changing the version number is also reasonable, and much more simple.

Path names? Bah.

[MrEricSir]

I say push it live, let those damn n00bs grow some chest hair by referencing all their files by inode id.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you: a gang of inode ids killed my father.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is GNU/Linux we are talking about right? So people actually wait for bugs to be fixed before pushing a release forward? That's news to me.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[dudpixel]

here's hoping said n00bs aren't female...

Re:Path names? Bah.

[NotBorg]

No. The topic is actually just Linux. Also, it's not uncommon for Linus to hold off on a release if things aren't "quiet" enough.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those inode ids also killed my slashdot user id. I suppose they got yours too?

Re:Path names? Bah.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

You too? I had a special character in my nick, and my old account has been broken for several months. Hence, the new name.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[aynoknman]

My name is Inode Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

I *hate* loud releases.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I hate the silent ones. Especially in elevators.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are not enough mod points in this universe to properly assess the value of the parent.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[NotBorg]

I'm indifferent to the audibility of an elevator release. A loud one might make it obvious who did it but you certainly won't escape it.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[rubycodez]

inode id: no Luke, *I* am your father!

Re:Path names? Bah.

[SQL Error]

Guess what happened when I first tried to register?

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a winner. We can close Slashdot for the week.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm moving the harddrive needle lefthanded, but I'm not lefthanded...

Re:Path names? Bah.

[DarkOx]

My name is Inode Montoya, You unlinked my father. Prepare to be free()'d.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

My name is Rain. And my fatherâ(TM)s a pirate, ninja terrorist, mermaid, Batman, Wonder Woman...

Re:Path names? Bah.

[pak9rabid]

So he was using ReiserFS?

Re:Path names? Bah.

[ArsonSmith]

Don't you mean that's GNUs to you?

Re:Path names? Bah.

[tlhIngan]

I say push it live, let those damn n00bs grow some chest hair by referencing all their files by inode id.

You may jest, but it has happened in real life - not sure where I read the story (the daily wtf?) but it was basically a secretary named every file she created with a number. In a notebook, she noted the file number and what it was.

Naturally, disaster struck and she lost the notebook.

Re:Path names? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's nice to laugh once in a wile, i haven't seen that movie in years.Princes Bride, thanks for your post.

Perhaps today IS a good day to die

[RogueWarrior65]

LET'S SHIP IT!!!

Re:Perhaps today IS a good day to die

[Anonymous Coward]

hoka hey, but I would agree with Linus that it could wait another day, look at HURD, people waited years

hoka hey tomorrow

Re:Perhaps today IS a good day to die

[Anonymous Coward]

WE'LL DO IT LIVE

Re:Perhaps today IS a good day to die

[Anonymous Coward]

You must work with me. "Aw screw it, Support will figure it out" is a company motto here.

Re:Perhaps today IS a good day to die

[TangoMargarine]

Klingon programmer quotes?

Weeks to reproduce in testing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it will be encountered many times each day.

A bug like that should never be knowingly unleashed.

No problem.

[loxosceles]

No problem. I'll just run GNU Hurd.

Re:No problem.

[renegadesx]

There are only 2 people in the world who run Hurd, RMS & the slashdot user formally known as 'twitter' (before the social networking site took off)

Re:No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are only 2 people in the world who run Hurd, RMS & the slashdot user formally known as 'twitter' (before the social networking site took off)

And Jesus.

Re:No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter is his formal name? Jesus, were his parents too poor to afford a real name?

Re:No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, Hurd runs Chuck Norris

Re:No problem.

[Hognoxious]

Did you know Chuck Norris can run Chuck Norris in a VM?

Without any hardware.

Re:No problem.

[bill_mcgonigle]

the slashdot user formally known as 'twitter'

Hell, I wish somebody had started a VC-funded website called bill_mcgonigle and I was living on the beach on the settlement money!

Re:No problem.

[Aeternitas827]

Which means, for every Chuck Norris, there can be an infinite number of Chuck Norrises.

And we're worried about Skynet...

Clearly there can be only one conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

And that conclusion is that Linux is ruined forever unless they skip version 3.0 and skip to version 9.9! Full speed ahead Mr. Sulu!

HOW DARE THEY

[DWMorse]

The shareholders will demand an answer for th ... wait.

Google+ is still in testing too

[cervesaebraciator]

Waiting for someone to take this as Linus Torvalds' recommendation of Google+...

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[jampola]

Okay, that's the last time I will reply to anyone semi-famous in G+ where they are sure to have about 100 replies thereafter! Especially since G+ decides it wants to subscribe my email to the thread and email me each reply! Seriously, what the fuck is with that??!!

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, that's the last time I will reply to anyone semi-famous in G+ where they are sure to have about 100 replies thereafter! Especially since G+ decides it wants to subscribe my email to the thread and email me each reply! Seriously, what the fuck is with that??!!

Down arrow on the top right of the post. Therein you'll find "Mute this post".

Good on ya for getting angry over nothing. :)

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that just mutes it on the website. Haven't tried, though.

However, there *is* a "Mute updates to this post" link on the bottom of *every* e-mail update sent from Google+. I guess the GP just can't read.

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[devphaeton]

Not a Google+ member, so I might be off a bit. However, in regards to manually opting out of email updates... should the GP have to?

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[TarMil]

You can of course disable them altogether in your account parameters.

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[Tubal-Cain]

He opted in by commenting on the post. Keeping everyone that is a part of a discussion "in the loop" is consistent with the purpose of social networking.

It isn't Google's fault that jampola chose to reply to a post which received a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[Anonymous Coward]

Google+

Is this that Wave thing they tried? I have no idea what Google+ is, nor do I care.

For the benefit of future historians and researchers, the non-vocal minority are as annoyed now with these 12 month social network fads as you will be. Anything pertaining to this issue should be in the lkml archives.

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[noonc]

Though shalt not worry! G+ is just yet another closed "social community" platform with the only difference that it's not called Facebook, not run by Facebook and the average age is slightly higher... for now.

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[Riceballsan]

I honestly don't get why anyone even begins to compare wave and google plus. I used wave, I liked wave, but it was not even pretending to be a social network. It was a tool designed for collaborating projects just looking at the plugins tools etc within it it was designed to share medium amounts of information with a small group of people, allowing tools like maps etc that all members could mark and edit in real time, it should be looked at as a failed companion to google docs. If you want to compare G+ to a failed google social network, buzz would be your target there, and yes buzz failed due to one huge mistake in privacy at day 1, fixed roughly by day 3, but the damage was already done (kind of rediculous IMO, I admit it's a huge flaw that people could see your contacts, but facebook had a bug that you could flat out evesdrop on peoples chat logs that was there almost as long and didn't get half the attention)

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[omnichad]

I think the Wave protocol was perfectly suited to social networking. However, the actual Google Wave web client was terrible.

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[mortonda]

go into your settings and change it then...

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus Torvalds's recommendation of Google+

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[Anonymous Coward]

Two clicks: Google+ Settings, uncheck the Email box next to "Comments on a post after I have commented on it"

Re:Google+ is still in testing too

[DaVince21]

Then turn off e-mail notifications! It's in the G+ settings. I'll have to agree that it's annoying that it's on by default.

If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[makubesu]

does this make this release actually 4.0?

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[adamstew]

No, only firefox does that.

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

You are confused. This is the Kernel, not Firefox.

BTW: I heard the guys at Mozilla are working on a new feature: The ability to change the version number while the browser is running. That's real progress.

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[renegadesx]

Yes but that feature has been delayed until the release of Firefox 7, so you will have to wait a week.

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought FF 7 was due out tomorrow! Check that, it's after midnight here so that's today!

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[ATMAvatar]

What confuses the hell out of me is that the official kernel version is still 6.x :(

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[dakameleon]

Doesn't Google already have a patent on that for Chrome?

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[TarMil]

FF7 has been out since 1997. Also, Aerith dies.

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[shutdown -p now]

BTW: I heard the guys at Mozilla are working on a new feature: The ability to change the version number while the browser is running. That's real progress.

That is true. They still do require you to restart the browser after that happens, however, so that extensions would properly stop working as they should.

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[sgbett]

No emacth is best!

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there's a good number of installers checking for the major version number to determine if it should or shouldn't install. Increasing the major version number leads to major breakage, so it's not unnecessarily updated.

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Service Packs don't change the major version.

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Reading this in chrome, laughing like hell ;)

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[marcosdumay]

Why would one be concerned about extensions if he can't use anything more than (a less functional version of) AdBlock to start with?

Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0

[renegadesx]

Windows 8 will likely be too unless they do a complete rewrite to accomodate ARM. Personally I think Windows 8 is a perfect opertunity to build on the rumored Midori/Singularity concept. Considering its all managed code portability and compatibility between the architectures would be alot easier.

But wait, what is this OS i'm using now?

[smoothnorman]

uname -ar > Linux trampel 3.0.0-rc7 ... but how is this possible? for i'm just a normal geek..?

Re:But wait, what is this OS i'm using now?

[jampola]

Really??? *slaps forehead*

Re:But wait, what is this OS i'm using now?

[besalope]

You have a release candidate. The official launch of RTM has been delayed.

Re:But wait, what is this OS i'm using now?

[DaVince21]

If you were a geek you would have realized rc means release candidate... Hence not an actual release yet, just a version proposed as the next release (which it isn't because of this bug they found).

Google Plus

[Wizarth]

I think the more important news here is - Linus uses Google+ for announcements now?

Facebook really is in trouble now.

Re:Google Plus

[pinkushun]

It may as well go sit and cry in the dark corner with Myspace

Re:Google Plus

[shutdown -p now]

Google should really start advertising G+ as "Facebook, but with people you actually care about".

Re:Google Plus

[Zebedeu]

Makes sense to me. Unlike Facebook, G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".

It's perfect for this type of announcement. It's Twitter for those who felt constrained by the character limit.

Re:Google Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

While that would be true for Linus' personal Facebook page, it would not be true if either he created a "Page" that people could simply "Like", or created a "Group", and posted to that.

Re:Google Plus

[Phs2501]

Even with a Facebook page, you still have an asininely-short arbitrary limit to the size of status updates that, given the length of Linus's update, doesn't appear to apply to Google+.

Re:Google Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes sense to me. Unlike Facebook, G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".

It's perfect for this type of announcement. It's Twitter for those who felt constrained by the character limit.

"anyone with an account" ?

Wouldn't it be even more perfect if anyone, even without an account, could follow the public posts?

Re:Google Plus

[Zebedeu]

You can look at a profile without needing an account. For an example, try Linus' own: https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts

However, there doesn't seem to be an RSS feed (though I could be mistaken), so I don't know how you'd follow his posts without visiting his profile often.

Re:Google Plus

[G3ckoG33k]

And like ftp replacing his need for hard drives, G+ replaces his needs for Twitter. People will twitter for him.

Re:Google Plus

[r_jensen11]

Makes sense to me. Unlike Facebook, G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".

It's perfect for this type of announcement. It's Twitter for those who felt constrained by the character limit.

What happened to mailing lists?

Re:Google Plus

[im_thatoneguy]

That was my impression as well. Facebook is actually ironically more private for me. The real Google+ competitor isn't Facebook, it's twitter.

I noticed within a couple days that the posts on Google+ weren't similar to my Facebook news feed, they were identical to my Twitter feed.

Google+ blows the doors off of Twitter and it accomplishes the same thing. It is built around the "Follow" philosophy instead of the "Friend" philosophy.

As a consequence I don't think people will feel safe and private on Google+. "If I can read Matt Damon's wall postings... then who can read mine?" We might intellectually know that only people in our friends circle can see our posts but with private posts mixed in with public celebrity postings I don't think people will ever really feel safe posting things they only want their friends to see.

Facebook already has the mechanism to handle "circles". It has "lists". It just has to move a single text field to the submission box and it has exactly the same functionality. What it doesn't have is a "public face" that lets you post and follow non-friends. I'm not sure that they should for the aforementioned reasons.

But I'm generally very happy about Google+ because I'm actually using it as an excuse now to stop following people on Facebook that I don't really know.

Re:Google Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the same as what happened to newsgroups.

Re:Google Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. The circles idea is nice but too complex for everyday usage IMHO. As for my usage, everything I publish on Facebook I consider public anyway, so I simply publish it on G+ as public. I hate Facebook as a company and hope they get replaced soon.

Re:Google Plus

[formfeed]

G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".

But if you are a true follower of Linus, you might really, really care that He, Linus, accepts you as a "friend".

Re:Google Plus

[recharged95]

It seems like everyone I know on Google+ are young tech people.... whom know someone that works at Google. No celebrities, no popular non-techs, etc... Just tech folks.

And from that and the chatter of the invites and how the services are being used, it appears to me (unless Google puts + into general release ASAP) that Google+ is becoming an enhanced version of Slashdot.

CmdrTaco, you've been warned...

Re:Google Plus

[Mr. Firewall]

It seems like everyone I know on Google+ are young tech people.... whom know someone that works at Google. No celebrities, no popular non-techs, etc... Just tech folks.

Yeah, like Ron Paul... William Shatner... Britney Spears...

GNU/gle+

[larry bagina]

What good is a FREE operating system if use it to blog on a proprietary social network?

Re:GNU/gle+

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's servers run on Linux.

Re:GNU/gle+

[renegadesx]

Ummm, Google uses Linux servers (Red Hat with Ubuntu desktops last time I checked). Not happy you dont have ssh access to the boxes? Setup your own web server, its not rocket science.

Re:GNU/gle+

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS wouldn't work too well for a centralized social network in which you need 50,000+ servers to keep running. Who else but Facebook or Amazon has that sort of infrastructure?

Re:GNU/gle+

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself.

I'd rather go back to eating whales and saving tofu...(it's a great bio-degradable spackle!)

Re:GNU/gle+

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a proprietary fork of the Linux kernel. Go open sores!

Re:GNU/gle+

[rubycodez]

abort gay whales for jesus!

Re:GNU/gle+

[DaVince21]

...and the social networking software on said Linux servers is proprietary.

Fair Enough

[jampola]

Reasons like " I don't think I want to release 3.0 just a couple of hours after applying it" would never fly in a commercial environment. This is why I love Linux and pretty much anything open source. I know it's cliche but whaddyagunnado?

Re:Fair Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what commercial environment you've been in, but in the places I've worked, release becomes hell because you have your bug list and someone (read a commitee) has gone through and labeled the "show stoppers" which are bugs deemed important enough to be fixed before the software can be released, and because of politics in the commitee, all but the most trivial become show stoppers. Upon fixing the last show stopper, the software then needs to go through regression at a minimum, and usually a complete test suite before it's allowed to be released. And even then, that goes into system integration, where the whole process starts again.

Re:Fair Enough

[tokul]

Commercials don't keep their software repository open to public. If you fsckup in OSS world, everyone can prove it. If shit happens in com world, they have PR department for that.

Re:Fair Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

This. jampola is obviously a child or a cowboy.

Re:Fair Enough

[ATMAvatar]

That depends on the balance of power in the organization. If sales/marketing have the bigger share of the power, QA is downsized or eliminated and the only "show stoppers" are unchecked feature boxes.

Re:Fair Enough

[MysteriousPreacher]

I think are conflating commercial with proprietary and closed source. OSS does not preclude commercial exploitation.

Re:Fair Enough

[marcosdumay]

On some organizations all that process happen after some manager already sent the software to packaging, so you'll have an update before even the release.

Of course, on other organizations both precedures run in parallel with some requisite changes. Those are the fun ones to work in.

Re:Fair Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, testing in most production environments I've observed consists of:
build, compile, ship
(the first 2 are optional)

Testing and QA are for customers.

Re:Fair Enough

[weicco]

Why bother. End user does QA anyway.

[x] post humorously

Re:Fair Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you start creeping up on the pre-planned date Marketing has for their big Reveal/Tradeshow/Campaign...

Hollywood celebrities and such forth...

[wyoung76]

... all moving to G+ and posting there instead will be the death of Facebook, but not a moment before

Re:Hollywood celebrities and such forth...

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes sense though.. it's like Twitter, except you can actually post something long enough to be worth reading ;)

Re:Hollywood celebrities and such forth...

[El Mooriachi]

Facebook will be alive and kicking until Google+ has Farmville.

Re:Hollywood celebrities and such forth...

[formfeed]

... all moving to G+ and posting there instead will be the death of Facebook, but not a moment before

I actually wouldn't mind if Facebook would survive as a place for Hollywood celebrities and such forth.
All the people I don't want to have around not joining G+ would turn it into G++

Re:Hollywood celebrities and such forth...

[cervesaebraciator]

Google is working on that... feature. Google+ has a celebrity acquisition plan

Re:Hollywood celebrities and such forth...

[cervesaebraciator]

As an aside, my favourite line in the article linked above:

But Twitter reached a new stratosphere when it got the endorsements from athletes and luminaries, such as Ashton Kutcher and President Barack Obama.

Re:An M$ Bug?

[renegadesx]

It was the 7th highest organisation (Intel & Red Hat contributed more than double each) and most of those contributions revolved around Hyper V and making sure Linux works on Hyper V as well as on VMWare as that is the market they are targeting in their virtualisation space.

WILL ANYONE NOTICE ??

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not !!

It's soooo fucking funny that this thing is a "3.0" (eeeh, wow?) and no one gives a shit if it ever gets out from wherever those things come !!

Re:WILL ANYONE NOTICE ??

[marcosdumay]

That's because it is not an important release. How was the weather under that rock you've been for the last couple of months?

Re:WILL ANYONE NOTICE ??

[DaVince21]

99% of the comments on that Google+ post seem to be people giving a shit. (The other 1% is fanboys saying "I luv u Linus".)

What was the bug?

[Theovon]

Anyone want to post some links/info on what the bug actually was?

Re:What was the bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? The bug is squished. I only care about the ones that aren't fixed in releases. At any rate one could just scan the subject lines of recent messages to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (https://lkml.org/). If the bug doesn't pop out at you and say "it's me, it's me" you likely won't understand the bug anyway.

Here's what the bug was!

[Theovon]

Sadly, I don't understand the explanation or what the patch changes.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103

Re:Here's what the bug was!

[FlyingGuy]

Ok, from my reading of the patch which could be WAY the fuck wrong BTW, I think it is a race condition between the unlinking of a file and returning the inode to the pool AND the CP command ( copy a file ) traversing the inode list. In other words the CP command was trying to stat a file that was partially unlinked do to the update of the node list still being in progress.

If you still don't understand that don't feel bad, I had to read and re-read the note like 10 times before I probably got this explanation wrong.

Re:Here's what the bug was!

[Anonymous Coward]

RCU - happens on multiple cores. Under memory pressure an entry may be dropped from the dentry cache at the moment somebody is trying to look up the file, making it look like the file just vanished.

Re:Here's what the bug was!

[rdebath]

And I think you're wrong, there's no "rm" involved.

The removal is that the file details are being cleared from the memory cache and the cp is only looking in the cache for something it knew was there but hasn't locked yet. Because it wasn't locked another thread though it was a good candidate to be removed from the cache. The cp then assumed it was gone because something physically deleted it.

Re:Here's what the bug was!

[jez9999]

The solution to this is really Obviously Correct; I don't know why they didn't post the bug in the summary:

That -ENOENT in walk_component: isn't it assuming we found a negative
dentry, before reaching the read_seqcount_retry which complete_walk
(or nameidata_drop_rcu_last before 3.0) would use to confirm a successful
lookup? And can't memory pressure prune a dentry, coming to dentry_kill
which __d_drops to unhash before dentry_iput resets d_inode to NULL, but
the dentry_rcuwalk_barrier between those is ineffective if the other end
ignores the seqcount?

Re:Here's what the bug was!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't feel bad, Linux said the bug is incredibly subtle, and the guy who found it needs 2 weeks to run his test setup against the patch in order to actually 'see' if the bug is gone. Its like you have to go through two weeks of the computer running at high volume going through inodes as fast as it can in order for this to show up (or not). Microsoft would have shipped months ago, but then, their priorities are different: 1) money,.......,2499) money, 2500) computer stuff something. Linus Torvalds is very well respected (and quite well paid). Bill Gates is no technology maven, and doesn't hold any respect among people who know about computers, but he's the second richest man in the world. Re-read my list about priorities.

Re:Here's what the bug was!

[FlyingGuy]

LOL! I don't feel bad in the least. This is serious code not for the faint at heart. I was happy just to be able to even understand what they were talking about and my understanding is incomplete. I mean even the guy who found it wasn't sure if they should ignore everything he said about the proposed fix or even the problem. Trust me I feel like I am in pretty damn good company.

I have been actively working at trying to grasp the the kernel code for 2 years now and while I feel comfortable with some of it I STILL like a complete noob!

Re:Here's what the bug was!

[Anonymous Coward]

Partly right.

My read is that it's a race condition between the /cached/ copy of an inode being purged from the cache and readers accessing said cache (and still getting a handle to the resource as it's already in the process of being purged, resulting in a dangling pointer).

Good.

[antdude]

Don't rush. Get those nasty bugs squished. :)

Here's what the bug was!

[FrootLoops]

https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103

[Posted by Theovon earlier, but I prefer a clickable link.]

The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[lucm]

I bet this mysterious bug is actually caused by a build script trying to pry source code from the bottomless pit of horror that is Git. One could qualify that as an "incredibly subtle pathname lookup bug"...

For everything besides committing, Git is horrible. This thing is actually making SourceSafe looks trusty and convenient.

Now that the world is running on Linux (except for MySpace and GoDaddy) it is a crime to impede its evolution by using such a painful system. Down with Git, and long live Anything Else.

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[FlyingGuy]

That's IT! You are off Linus's Christmas list for sure buddy!

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[macshit]

It can take time for some people to get used to git ("wait the commands aren't exactly the same as CVS!? noooooooooo...").

But once it clicks, you'll never want to go back.

There's a good reason git is by far the most popular "new generation" source-control system (and no, it's not "because Linus is popular"). It's simply more powerful, more facile, more nimble than the competition.

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[Serious Callers Only]

For everything besides committing, Git is horrible

It would be nice to know what you had a problem with. People here could perhaps enlighten you as to why things aren't working out for you, or you could enlighten them as to why git is inferior. It has its flaws (chiefly obscure error messages), but I've found it a better fit than cvs and svn.

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[Anonymous Coward]

It can take time for some people to get used to git

as a CVS n00b, I understood how it worked easily.. the repo is there and these are my files and I can see what the difference is and commit my changes. Several years later and I'm still struggling to understand how git works. I have contributed to several projects requiring "git format patches" rather than just a diff and to be honest I worked out how to clone the repo, then apply my diff and generate those "git format patches" but then I have to delete the repo and clone it again because pulling back the changes from upstream generally leaves me with a pile of shit and incomprehensible errors.

and no, it's not "because Linus is popular"

but that of course was a large part of it

Its not that CVS is great, everybody can see that it has limitations, but git is incomprehensible and whats more use of it has the tendency to turn mailing lists into patch dumping grounds, and developers into patch shepherds. This might be great for Linus' own project but there must be something better

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[m50d]

Facile? Did you really mean that?

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[MichaelSmith]

there must be something better

Mercurial

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[horza]

I think he meant agile, though 'facile' is actually French for 'easy'.

Phillip.

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[Anonymous Coward]

If deleting your repository is how you resolve merge conflicts, there's a good chance you're doing it wrong.

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[Anonymous Coward]

well, if pulling back changes from upstream left him with a pile of shit and incomprehensible error messages, there is a good chance that the program is doing something wrong

I don't know though, blaming it on the user is the easy way..

Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes

[Hognoxious]

It has a similar meaning in English, though I swear I've never heard or seen it used that way, or indeed with any positive connotations.

i think the bug is fixed now

[sunr2007]

Looks like the bug is fixed . so we might see Linux-3.0 in a couple of days. http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=131104131518622&w=2

System is stable enough

[pinkushun]

... to wait until then! XD

Woah! m$ could slip in *anything* in those 2 hours

[phonewebcam]

Look what they did to Nokia. m$ watchers knew a leopard can't change its spots, and it was all flowers and roses at the start...

breaking software

[goarilla]

I'm wondering how much stuff will break that checks for a 2.x kernel.

Re:breaking software

[geckipede]

Everything. Literally everything.

All webserver and database software will go, then so will email, then windows software will start breaking. Every human on Earth will go mad, then the planet will descend into the sun, and finally the laws of physics themselves will become unstable and the universe will start generating paradoxes and fail utterly.

Re:breaking software

[goarilla]

Undoubtedly this will get lots of replies how Windows software is already utterly broken.

Re:breaking software

[sunr2007]

Undoubtedly this will get lots of replies how Windows software is already utterly broken.

Not really. Everybody knows how broken windows is ! . "To Each his Own!

Linux is stuck in the 90s

[Anonymous Coward]

Man... Linux is only still at version 2 moving to 3! It must be garbage! I prefer to use programs that are at least at version 10 or higher. Have fun using your immature software!

Re:Linux is stuck in the 90s

[rubycodez]

my Ubuntu goes all the way to 11!


p.s. (then it jumped the shark)

Linus Torvalds and Google+

[Kagetsuki]

...A recent Google+ Post by Linus Torvalds...

When the fuck did this happen!?

Re:Linus Torvalds and Google+

[maxume]

Recently.

Re:Linus Torvalds and Google+

[smallfries]

Beautiful.

Re:Major/minor versions

[EsbenMoseHansen]

I thought major version increments were for major, incompatible changes, while minor versions were for smaller, compatible ones?

That is still mostly true, but only for libraries. It doesn't make much sense for applications, except perhaps with respect to plug-ins, which I understand Firefox breaks with abandon every point release.

Re:"+1 Sad but true"

[TaoPhoenix]

There is! It's 'Underrated"!

HTML? You fail it

[drinkypoo]

You linked the wrong text. The link is to the google+ entry, and that is the text that should be highlighted.

I bet your website requires javascript too.

How is this news?

[UltraZelda64]

It's already been posted that 3.0 is just an incremental upgrade to the 2.6.xx series, effectively making it just another usual update, absolutely nothing special beyond the big version number bump. So seriously, how is Linux 3.0 being delayed worthy of making the news?

Re:How is this news?

[kiwimate]

1. It's Linux, you fool!
2. This is Slashdot.
3. For bonus points - Linus commented on it. (Angels sing in glorious dulcet tones.)
4. ...and used a Google tool to do so. (Angels commence gentle strumming of harps.)
5. ...one that competes with the evil Facebook. (Lo, Satan is vanquished.)

Q.E.D. I mean, really...

Re:Major/minor versions

[LingNoi]

I think it still makes sense for applications, for example incompatible save files, client / server communication, etc. There's still some stuff out there that makes it valid for application use.

From the bug entry...

[Anonymous Coward]

That -ENOENT in walk_component: isn't it assuming we found a negative
dentry, before reaching the read_seqcount_retry which complete_walk
(or nameidata_drop_rcu_last before 3.0) would use to confirm a successful
lookup? And can't memory pressure prune a dentry, coming to dentry_kill
which __d_drops to unhash before dentry_iput resets d_inode to NULL, but
the dentry_rcuwalk_barrier between those is ineffective if the other end
ignores the seqcount?

Move !inode -ENOENT checks from walk_component down into do_lookup,
adding read_seqcount_retry confirmation in the RCU case. And use
path_put_conditional instead of path_to_nameidata (a reverse way of

I think I got past the first word. But then I had to take 3 craps in a row, I think trying to read this gave my dysentery.

Re:From the bug entry...

[Mr. Firewall]

I think I got past the first word. But then I had to take 3 craps in a row

Oh man, I almost spewed coffee all over my monitor when I read that!