Linus Torvalds: Comments on Kernel Releases

“The _real_ solution is to make fewer fundamental changes between stable
kernels, and that’s a real solution that I expect to become more and more
realistic as the kernel stabilizes. I already expect 2.5 to have a _lot_
less fundamental changes than the 2.3.x tree ever had – the SMP
scaliability efforts and page-cachification between 2.2.x and 2.4.x is
really quite a big change.”

                        Date:   Sun, 25 Nov 2001 19:58:41 -0800 (PST)
                        From: Linus Torvalds 
                        Subject: Re: [RFC] 2.5/2.6/2.7 transition [was Re: Linux 2.4.16-pre1]

                        On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, Mike Fedyk wrote:
                        >
                        > Personally, I think that 2.4 was released too early.  It was when the
                        > Internet hype was going full force, and nobody (including myself) could be
                        > faulted for getting swept up in the wave that it was.

                        That's not the problem, I think.

                        2.4.0 was appropriate for the time. The problem with _any_ big release is
                        that the people you _really_ want to test it won't test it until it is
                        stable, and you cannot make it stable before you have lots of testers. A
                        basic chicken-and-egg problem, in short.

                        You find the same thing (to a smaller degree) with the pre-patches, where
                        a lot more people end up testing the non-pre-patches, and inevitably there
                        are more percieved problems with the "real" version than with the
                        pre-patch. Just statistically you should realize that that is not actually
                        true ;)

                        > 1) Develop 2.5 until it is ready to be 2.6 and immediately give it over to
                        > a maintainer, and start 2.7.

                        I'd love to do that, but it doesn't really work very well. Simply because
                        whenever the "stable" fork happens, there are going to be issues that the
                        bleeding-edge guard didn't notice, or didn't realize how they bite people
                        in the real world.

                        So I could throw a 2.6 directly over the fence, and start a 2.7 series,
                        but that would have two really killer problems

                         (a) I really don't like giving something bad to whoever gets to be
                             maintainer of the stable kernel. It just doesn't work that way:
                             whoever would be willing to maintain such a stable kernel would be a
                             real sucker and a glutton for punishment.

                         (b) Even if I found a glutton for punishment that was intelligent enough
                             in other ways to be a good maintainer, the _development_ tree too
                             needs to start off from a "known reasonably good" point. It doesn't
                             have to be perfect, but it needs to be _known_.

                        For good or for bad, we actually have that now with 2.4.x - the system
                        does look fairly stable, with just some silly problems that have known
                        solutions and aren't a major pain to handle. So the 2.5.x release is off
                        to a good start, which it simply wouldn't have had if I had just cut over
                        from 2.4.0.

                        The _real_ solution is to make fewer fundamental changes between stable
                        kernels, and that's a real solution that I expect to become more and more
                        realistic as the kernel stabilizes. I already expect 2.5 to have a _lot_
                        less fundamental changes than the 2.3.x tree ever had - the SMP
                        scaliability efforts and page-cachification between 2.2.x and 2.4.x is
                        really quite a big change.

                        But you also have to realize that "fewer fundamental changes" is a mark of
                        a system that isn't evolving as quickly, and that is reaching middle age.
                        We are probably not quite there yet ;)

                                        Linu