David S. Miller writes:
> Why not just
> tell these people "why are you working on experimental stuff, put
> together PPC stress test and kernel regression suites if you are
> bored, because we know 2.4.x isn't read for prime time"
Mainly because:
1. the people providing the new "features" have not provided the
"features" that are in 2.4.x.
2. Some people just don't subscribe to this idea, and, like Cort,
they will go off and produce their own tree.
I have a real example of (2) which happened *because* I wanted to make
2.2 stable - ARM now has a CVS tree which is used by a lot of people.
This CVS tree was created, IMHO, because I tried to reduce the number
of features going into late 2.1/early 2.2.
Hence, the traditional argument that is applied to the "x86" side of
Linux just doesn't hack it everywhere - if you try to apply it, you
end up with people forking the tree left right and center. And no,
they don't come back in a rush when you eventually get around to 2.5.
They come back just before you finish 2.5.
If I take what I believe to be Linus' attitude that I shouldn't care
about this, then I'm just kidding myself - my code will just become a
basis of all these other trees, and the only thing I'll be doing from
that point on is providing a service to them where Linus' patches are
cleanly merged with what my tree was a couple of years ago (ie, no new
patches come in).
I'm not agreeing that the fundamental "development/stable" cycles are
bad, but trying to stop new features 100% is a bit like trying to build
a damn out of sand for some of the architecture maintainers - it just
doesn't work.
_____
|_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
| | Russell King rmk@arm.linux.org.uk --- ---
| | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html / / |
| +-+-+ --- -+-
/ | THE developer of ARM Linux |+| /|\
/ | | | --- |
+-+-+ ------------------------------------------------- /\\\ |
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