Slashdot Mirror
Kernel Feature freeze in 2 weeks?
According to an email written by Linus, "a feature freeze in about two weeks is the current plan", so people who wants their patch included (a hint to ISDN dev. guys) should work/write faster. I guess kernel 2.4 may be out this fall after all.
a) Linus decides, presumably based on the degree of change between the versions. I seem to recall seeing somewhere that he thought, in retrospect, that 2.0 should have been 1.4 and the 2.0 version number saved for what became 2.2... Either way, this next version will have only minor changes from 2.2, so it's clearly a 2.4.
:)
b) A feature freeze is when they stop adding new features and concentrate solely on working the stuff that's already there. Some feature freezes are more frozen than others - framebuffers, for example, were added to 2.1 after Linus' announcement that 2.1 was frozen.
As for the second part of your question... there's a difference between "stable", "bug-free", and "perfect". If it doesn't crash but doesn't work quite right, either, it's stable but not bug-free. If it does everything correctly but doesn't do everything you want, it's bug-free but not perfect. If it doesn't crash, does everything you could want, and does it correctly, then it's stable, bug-free, and perfect.
Note that for non-trivial pieces of software, "bug-free" and "perfect" are only theoretical conditions... they never happen in practice. There's always one more bug. Some pieces of software get closer than others, though...
Feature freeze != code freeze. Even the best programmers occasionally have bugs in their code, and that's why a feature freeze is a Good Thing, as it lets the coders focus on fixing the bugs.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Running a fresh new kernel is like putting on a warm pair of boxers strait out of the drier.. Mmm....
Corndog
Thousands of Linux advocates and Transmeta watchers are debating the significance of a recent email sent from Linus Torvalds to Alan Cox on 8-3-99. The email read in part:
/. thousands have suggested that he is implying that Transmeta has created a magic invisibility device which Torvalds will use to battle the fiendish crime lord Erik "The Red" Blowhard. /. "I think that Linus didn't mean to cc. the kernel list on this one. He's spilled the beans on the whole Transmeta operation. Think about it. Invisibility suits. This rules. FIRST POST."
/.
Probably. I really think it's a matter of "if this device really doesn't
have any ordering constraints, then we can use the new nifty feature to
make it invisible to most users".
The big question is what did Linus mean by those fateful words. On
"Wow man!" Shouted flak in a post to
Anthropologists have postulated that Linus' mails receive so much attention because he is seen as a sort of divine "priest king" by his followers. "Unfortunately, this means that if the pace of development on the kernel ever slows, the crazed worshippers may sacrifice Linus to regain the favor of their gods. History shows this pattern occurring again and again." commented Dr. Rajeev Papshigali of the University of Utah. "If the sacrifice is unsuccessful, we may see Linux users losing their faith and joining other strange sects. Possibly they may even convert to one of the daemonology cults that originated at UC Berkeley."
An AC suggested that this was an out-of-context quote from a mail about standard pc bus architecture. This was quickly moderated down as "flame bait" as was another post wondering if Linus could scratch his nose without having the event posted on
--Shoeboy