Messages in this thread | | | From | "Russell Coker - mailing lists account" <> | Date | Thu, 17 Jul 97 22:54:23 +1100 | 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 >> 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.
>> 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 >> development kernels is that it's easier to keep track of what you're doing >> if you do it all at once. Some people such as Alan Cox and Dave Miller >> work on many different parts of the kernel. If they were politely informed >> that a new feature they had added had broken something else shortly after >> the release of the code then I'm sure that they would be able to either fix >> the problem or give some background information that allows a less skilled >> programmer to fix it with a minimum amount of effort. However if the bug >> goes undiscovered for 6 months because no-one tries compiling a certain >> combination of modules (or whatever the trigger is) then they are likely to >> require much more work to fix it.
>By defining even more levels of "official" release policy, you are running >the danger of blocking the creativity of the biggest contributers to >Linux. In my mind, the model works like this:
I had no intention of implying that we should delay releases of kernels for any reason. As I stated in the second paragraph that you quoted the aim should be to discover bugs ASAP to enable them to be fixed more quickly and easily.
Russell Coker
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