Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 16 Jul 97 16:16 BST | From | Martin Radford <> | Subject | Re: 2.0.31 : please! |
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That is a fair comment. However I believe that we could do with some serious effort to ensure that things don't get broken in the course of adding new features. I don't think that a 2.1.x release should be held up
I think this would be very difficult. I don't believe any of the "core" kernel hackers have access to all the hardware that Linux supports, and hence they can't ensure that nothing gets broken. As has been pointed out, it's better that things are left in a non-compiling state than being subtly broken. Hopefully the active maintainers of various sections of the kernel have a private mailing list where Linus/David/Alan etc. could post messages saying "By the way, I'm starting to re-write <foo>; if this will affect anything you maintain, this may well break your code."
because of this, however if a serious testing effort was applied to the pre-patches it would provide a list of things that need work. Then hopefully most of these issues would be fixed before the full releae of the 2.1.x version.
>b) You cannot verify everything, and I bet just because ISDN compiles for >you, doesn't mean that the SCSI driver for my Amiga compiles for me.
I believe that I have proved that it is impossible to test all combinations of kernel options. But I believe that if we test a reasonable number of kernels then we can discover (and therefore fix) bugs that might otherwise hang around for ages. One reason for doing this in the
Perhaps people should be encouraged to download the {pre-,}patches and build a kernel for their own configuration. They wouldn't necessarily use the kernel once they'd compiled it, but would report back if the compilation failed. One problem is that the kernel now takes up such a large amount of disk space, some people may not be able to spare the space (2.1.35, the most recent tree I have on my machine, takes 31Mb and that's just the source (no object files around)).
[snip] -- Martin Radford | martin@zamenhof.demon.co.uk | M.P.Radford@exeter.ac.uk
"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus Torvalds
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