From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262194AbVAEBSE (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Jan 2005 20:18:04 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262220AbVAEBOv (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Jan 2005 20:14:51 -0500 Received: from clock-tower.bc.nu ([81.2.110.250]:23991 "EHLO localhost.localdomain") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262214AbVAEBLj (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Jan 2005 20:11:39 -0500 Subject: Re: starting with 2.7 From: Alan Cox To: Willy Tarreau Cc: William Lee Irwin III , Adrian Bunk , Diego Calleja , davidsen@tmr.com, aebr@win.tue.nl, solt2@dns.toxicfilms.tv, Linux Kernel Mailing List In-Reply-To: <20050104201750.GB22075@alpha.home.local> References: <20050102221534.GG4183@stusta.de> <41D87A64.1070207@tmr.com> <20050103003011.GP29332@holomorphy.com> <20050103004551.GK4183@stusta.de> <20050103011935.GQ29332@holomorphy.com> <20050103053304.GA7048@alpha.home.local> <20050103142412.490239b8.diegocg@teleline.es> <20050103134727.GA2980@stusta.de> <20050104125738.GC2708@holomorphy.com> <20050104201750.GB22075@alpha.home.local> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <1104879221.17176.69.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.4.6 (1.4.6-2) Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:02:01 +0000 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Maw, 2005-01-04 at 20:17, Willy Tarreau wrote: > So how do some distro makers manage to stabilize their 'enterprise' versions, > stay on a 2.4.21 with hundreds of patches which overall seem to work pretty > well ? The distro maker I think about has quite a big crunch of the kernel > developpers, and I suspect that they do this work themselves. If they can > refrain from putting new features everyday in their employer's product, why > can't they do the same for the free version ? We employ a small army of highly qualified QA and engineering people to do that. It's very very hard work. In addition we make choices that suit our business customers but would be very bad for progress if they were the "base". To a lot of our customers progress is evil unless they can schedule it six months in advance. If the base kernel worked that way we'd not have gotten a useful OS yet. Don't confuse the deployment goals of big business and the developer goals of the community. If you stand in the middle you get stretched into strange directions and eventually (as we found with the Fedora v RHEL split) you can't do both at the same time. > one works for me" and stick to it for a time. Indeed, I think that if 2.6.11 > would stay a year in -rc version, then Alan would release tens of 2.6.10 > derivatives which would then become far more stable than what the next 2.6.11 > would be. It always depends "at what". 2.6.10 is more stable than 2.6.9-ac at SCSI and USB for example because the backports were too complex. Alan