Re: My thoughts on the "new development model"

From: Bill Davidsen (davidsen_at_tmr.com)
Date: 10/25/04

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    Date:	Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:15:05 -0400
To: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>

    William Lee Irwin III wrote:

    > We aren't just stabilizing 2.6. We're moving it forward. Part of moving
    > forward is preventing backportmania depravity. Backporting is the root
    > of all evil.

    Damn! And I thought it was closed source software...

    Let me just put forward my single criterion for stable vs. not, and that
    is that if I am running a stable kernel and upgrade to a new version to
    gain a feature or security fix my existing programs don't break. That
    means to me that if Reiser4 goes in, Reiser3 doesn't exit. If something
    more please to theoretical cryptographers than cryptoloop comes out,
    cryptoloop doesn't go away. Etc, these are just examples.

    It doesn't bother me (and I believe most users of kernel.org releases)
    when a new features comes in, until it breaks something even though I
    don't use the new feature. It's when there is an incompatible change,
    like the rewrite of modules, that I think a development kernel is needed.

    I don't see the need for a development kernel, and it is desirable to be
    able to run kernel.org kernels. I would like to hope that other people
    agree that stable need not mean static, as long as changes don't
    deliberately break existing apps.

    I note that BSD has another serious fork and that people are actually
    moving to Linux after installing SP2 and finding it disfunctional with
    non-MS software. Nice to see people looking at Linux as the stable
    choice. I would like to hope that continues. 

    -- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me
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