Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 23 Mar 2003 16:51:24 -0500 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | Re: Ptrace hole / Linux 2.2.25 |
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Martin J. Bligh wrote: >>>But if you assume this, what are the official releases for anyway? >> >>Well, official releases have always been sort of arbitrary for the >>kernel... just labeled releases along the course of development. >>Although with the recent addition of the -rc patches, they tend to >>ensure the latest round of development at least resulted in a stable >>release. But look at all the major vendors - their 2.4.18 release, for >>example, may include whatever the latest pre-patch was at the time. > > > I don't agree that's always been true by any means. It may currently > be true, but that's far from a good thing. The current state of divergance > the distros have from mainline 2.4 is IMHO the biggest problem Linux has > today. > > The distros inherently have a conflict of interest getting changes merged > back into mainline ... it's time consuming to do, it provides them no real > benefit (they have to maintain their huge trees anyway), and it actively > damages the "value add" they provide.
Just to underscore Arjan's point: non-mainline patches are very actively discouraged at Red Hat. As time progresses the maintenance cost of EACH non-mainline patch increases. Non-mainline patches do not get the benefits of wide community testing, review, and feedback. Further, Red Hat employees in my experience typically land patches in the community _first_ -- witness my netdriver work (goes me -> Marcelo -> RH), DaveM's net stack work, and Alan's -ac tree.
Jeff
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