Linux 4.17 Released (betanews.com)

Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: In his weekly message to the Linux community on Sunday, Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.17. The release comes a couple of months after the first release candidate, and in his message Torvalds also talks about version 5.0 of the Linux kernel. Having previously said that Linux kernel v5.0 "should be meaningless," he said that this next major numerical milestone will come around "in the not too distance future." For now, though, it's version 4.17 -- or Merciless Moray, if you prefer -- that's of interest. Linux kernel 4.17 is not a major release, and Torvalds announced it without much fanfare. "So this last week was pretty calm, even if the pattern of most of the stuff coming in on a Friday made it feel less so as the weekend approached. And while I would have liked even less changes, I really didn't get the feeling that another week would help the release in any way, so here we are, with 4.17 released."

Comments

Re:I miss consistant version numbers.

[jmv]

It's not so much that the numbering changed. What really changed was the development methodology and the numbering just reflects that. Going from 2.4 to 2.6 took forever because there were too many changes, some not so well tested and because it was taking forever to stabilize, more changes would come in because otherwise it would take years before they could come in. So progress was (relatively) slow and new features had to be shipped through custom patches rather than mainline. There's been a general realization (not just for the kernel) that that kind of development cycle just couldn't work anymore. That's why the kernel has moved to a shorter development cycle. It means there's less pressure to put new features "as soon as possible because otherwise it will be delayed by years", so much fewer things to debug in each release and overall, everything's better. The only drawback is for people who don't want to upgrade as often and that's why there are a few special "stable" releases once in a while (and Firefox has ESRs). If Linus had kept the old development model, I suspect the current "stable" kernel would still be a 2.6.x and there would be a 2.7.392 development kernel that still wouldn't be ready to ship.