The 2.5 Kernel Tree And Alan Cox

Motor writes "It seems that (as everyone suspected), the 2.5 Linux kernel tree is close to opening. However, contrary to expectations, 2.4 will not be maintained by Alan Cox, but will instead be handled by Marcelo Tosatti. Thanks to Alan for all his hard work on 2.0 and 2.2."

Re:Alan Cox hijacked development

[damiam]

All Alan Cox did was to refrain from mentioning something in a changelog because he thought it would be illegal. It's like saying "I won't carry a concealed weapon because it's illegal". It may be your view that it shouldn't be illegal, but that doesn't mean you don't have to follow the law.

Ext3/JBD

[Alan Cox]

The ext3 stuff is scheduled for merging soon. The VM is simply more important, and as of 2.4.14pre7 basically works (there are a couple of corner cases left where it fails) - and is much faster than the older Riel VM. That was a concluded experiment anyway

RH doesn't get to decide what I feed to Linus,and Linus wouldn't listen if they did. XFS is 2.5 material certainly. JFS I don't know - Im watching it with great interest.

Alan

Re:VM is the reason?

[sydb]

Now that's just silly.

He'd be free to rip out the Andrea VM if he wanted; however, I believe his concern is not about the technical aspects of the new VM but the principles involved in making deep changes to a stable kernel.

Re:Where did linus say this on lkml??

[Alan Cox]

I wanted to work more on other stuff. We both felt Marcelo was a great choice and Marcelo wanted to be 2.4 maintainer

Re:New Maintainer weblog? - karma whoring at 50..

[iamsure]

Since you asked, and everyone else will want to know..

Here is some info on our new maintainer..

Marcelo works for Connectiva. He lives with "Rik". He looks like [conectiva.com.br]this.

His weblog is here. [advogato.org]
His "homepage" area is here [conectiva.com.br]

And I gotta say.. impressive to get that level of responsibility at his age..

Re:What about the diversity of the kernel team?

[puetzk]

Read his actual comment (like anyone on /. ever does that anymore). He's not getting out of kernel development, he's just not maintaining the stable series this time around. He says he's gonna be working on other kernel projects - a.k.a., he wants his shot at the fun in the devel tree :-)

Re:What about the diversity of the kernel team?

[pjbass]

To reiterate what the other reply to this parent said, he is not getting out of development. He is just going to be working under the radar a bit more.

But is this really a bad thing? I mean, don't get me wrong; Alan has been wonderful and instrumental to Linux going where it has gone. But the beauty and power of open source is the diversity of its developers. If Alan maintained all stable trees from now on, the kernel would certainly get incredible attention and development. However, it would be Alan's tree. Again, not that this is a bad thing. Yet, sometimes you need some new blood just to get that spark going again. Just my view on the whole situation.


Kudos to the whole team though. And thanks Alan for the great work. Good luck on the new endeavors.

His own words.

[voz]

If you're not familiar with Marcelo Tosatti and feel that you want to "read up" on him. Here's a good way. Follow the link below and you'll find over a 1000 posts made by him in different linux mailing lists, particularly the kernel list. Marcelo Tosatti in the MARC archives [theaimsgroup.com]