Linux 3.0 Release Delayed 187
JustinRLynn writes "A recent Google+ Post by Linus Torvalds indicates that version 3.0 of the Linux kernel will have to wait due to the discovery of a 'subtle pathname lookup bug.' Linus indicates, 'We have a patch, we understand the problem, and it looks ObviouslyCorrect(tm), but I don't think I want to release 3.0 just a couple of hours after applying it.'"
Chicken? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Chicken? (Score:4, Funny)
Project Manager: Did it build?
Developer: Yea, but we haven't even run the thing yet
Project Manager: Ship it!
Re:Chicken? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Chicken? (Score:5, Funny)
Your project managers make you get a completely clean build before you ship? How do you guys stay on schedule?
Simple enough, Firefox style: Any time you get a semi-clean build, you tag it. When you release, you simply bump the version number of the last tagged build. So what if you don't get half the features - it's a new version, as witnessed by the version number!
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And with the new policy they increment the major version number every time they hit 'Build'.
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I thought major version increments were for major, incompatible changes, while minor versions were for smaller, compatible ones?
That is still mostly true, but only for libraries. It doesn't make much sense for applications, except perhaps with respect to plug-ins, which I understand Firefox breaks with abandon every point release.
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I think it still makes sense for applications, for example incompatible save files, client / server communication, etc. There's still some stuff out there that makes it valid for application use.
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I for one am glad a geek IS the project manager.
More focused on getting it right than meeting deadlines.
Re:Chicken? (Score:4, Funny)
I for one am glad a geek IS the project manager.
More focused on getting it right than meeting deadlines.
That would explain why GNU/Hurd is such an excellent OS
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RMS isn't a geek. He's a fanatic.
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RMS isn't a geek. He's a fanatic.
How are those mutually exclusive? And if somebody that writes a good chunk of emacs and gcc isn't a geek I'm not quite sure what your definition is. Ungrateful git.
Phillip.
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You don't come across a broken printer driver and say "Hey, I want to fix this. Where's the source code for it?" without being something of a geek. He wrote a Lisp interpreter, if that's not geeky then I don't know what is. I don't know how much of the GNU project he wrote himself, but I doubt he said "Everyone else you write the code, I'll lead." to get it started. And a life dedicated to software and source code, that sure sounds like a fanatic geek to me. Of course he's no Linus kind of geek, but then ag
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Project Manager: Did it build?
Developer: Yea, but we haven't even run the thing yet
Project Manager: Ship it!
There doesn't seem to be a mod for '+1 sad but true'.
Re:"+1 Sad but true" (Score:3)
There is! It's 'Underrated"!
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A number of months back I was trolled and trolled moderated at the very concept that anyone other than developers are typically responsible for late releases and buggy products. I fully expect a large number of people here literally had no clue your post was anything but serious - except for the fact it has been moderated funny.
Sad.
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In a decent engineering environment, regardless of it being "agile" or not, I would hope that the decision was made to formally release to customers, and a branch was created for that release. After a short period of stabilisation (removal of critical bugs, but no more features) the most recent build from that branch can be released, while feature development has continued on master/trunk. All of those bug fixes can be merged back into master for mainline development.
Sure, you might provide canary/integrati
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You have good fortune if your test cases reflect all of the possible scenarios your customers might subject your software to. Most developers don't get to work with such a narrow constraint.
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Apparently I wasn't sufficiently sarcastic, since several people have already took that comment for real. That despite the ~ there.
Jeez, of course you don't just grab integration builds and release them, Agile or not! My post was only extending GP's idea to its logical "agile" pinnacle of absurdity.
Path names? Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
I say push it live, let those damn n00bs grow some chest hair by referencing all their files by inode id.
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Fuck you: a gang of inode ids killed my father.
Re:Path names? Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Path names? Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
My name is Inode Montoya, You unlinked my father. Prepare to be free()'d.
Re:Path names? Bah. (Score:4, Funny)
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Guess what happened when I first tried to register?
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Re:Path names? Bah. (Score:5, Informative)
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Don't you mean that's GNUs to you?
Re:Path names? Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
here's hoping said n00bs aren't female...
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You may jest, but it has happened in real life - not sure where I read the story (the daily wtf?) but it was basically a secretary named every file she created with a number. In a notebook, she noted the file number and what it was.
Naturally, disaster struck and she lost the notebook.
Perhaps today IS a good day to die (Score:3)
LET'S SHIP IT!!!
No problem. (Score:5, Funny)
No problem. I'll just run GNU Hurd.
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the slashdot user formally known as 'twitter'
Hell, I wish somebody had started a VC-funded website called bill_mcgonigle and I was living on the beach on the settlement money!
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Did you know Chuck Norris can run Chuck Norris in a VM?
Without any hardware.
HOW DARE THEY (Score:5, Funny)
Google+ is still in testing too (Score:3, Insightful)
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go into your settings and change it then...
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Not a Google+ member, so I might be off a bit. However, in regards to manually opting out of email updates... should the GP have to?
Re:Google+ is still in testing too (Score:4, Informative)
He opted in by commenting on the post. Keeping everyone that is a part of a discussion "in the loop" is consistent with the purpose of social networking.
It isn't Google's fault that jampola chose to reply to a post which received a high signal-to-noise ratio.
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I think the Wave protocol was perfectly suited to social networking. However, the actual Google Wave web client was terrible.
But wait, what is this OS i'm using now? (Score:2)
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Google Plus (Score:5, Funny)
I think the more important news here is - Linus uses Google+ for announcements now?
Facebook really is in trouble now.
Hollywood celebrities and such forth... (Score:3)
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... all moving to G+ and posting there instead will be the death of Facebook, but not a moment before
I actually wouldn't mind if Facebook would survive as a place for Hollywood celebrities and such forth.
All the people I don't want to have around not joining G+ would turn it into G++
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It may as well go sit and cry in the dark corner with Myspace
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Google should really start advertising G+ as "Facebook, but with people you actually care about".
Re:Google Plus (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes sense to me. Unlike Facebook, G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".
It's perfect for this type of announcement. It's Twitter for those who felt constrained by the character limit.
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And like ftp replacing his need for hard drives, G+ replaces his needs for Twitter. People will twitter for him.
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Makes sense to me. Unlike Facebook, G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".
It's perfect for this type of announcement. It's Twitter for those who felt constrained by the character limit.
What happened to mailing lists?
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That was my impression as well. Facebook is actually ironically more private for me. The real Google+ competitor isn't Facebook, it's twitter.
I noticed within a couple days that the posts on Google+ weren't similar to my Facebook news feed, they were identical to my Twitter feed.
Google+ blows the doors off of Twitter and it accomplishes the same thing. It is built around the "Follow" philosophy instead of the "Friend" philosophy.
As a consequence I don't think people will feel safe and private on Google
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G+ allows anyone with an account to follow Linus's public posts without him having to accept them as his "friends".
But if you are a true follower of Linus, you might really, really care that He, Linus, accepts you as a "friend".
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You can look at a profile without needing an account. For an example, try Linus' own: https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts [google.com]
However, there doesn't seem to be an RSS feed (though I could be mistaken), so I don't know how you'd follow his posts without visiting his profile often.
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It seems like everyone I know on Google+ are young tech people.... whom know someone that works at Google. No celebrities, no popular non-techs, etc... Just tech folks.
And from that and the chatter of the invites and how the services are being used, it appears to me (unless Google puts + into general release ASAP) that Google+ is becoming an enhanced version of Slashdot.
CmdrTaco, you've been warned...
Fair Enough (Score:2, Insightful)
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I don't know what commercial environment you've been in, but in the places I've worked, release becomes hell because you have your bug list and someone (read a commitee) has gone through and labeled the "show stoppers" which are bugs deemed important enough to be fixed before the software can be released, and because of politics in the commitee, all but the most trivial become show stoppers. Upon fixing the last show stopper, the software then needs to go through regression at a minimum, and usually a comp
Re:Fair Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why bother. End user does QA anyway.
[x] post humorously
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On some organizations all that process happen after some manager already sent the software to packaging, so you'll have an update before even the release.
Of course, on other organizations both precedures run in parallel with some requisite changes. Those are the fun ones to work in.
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I think are conflating commercial with proprietary and closed source. OSS does not preclude commercial exploitation.
What was the bug? (Score:2)
Anyone want to post some links/info on what the bug actually was?
Here's what the bug was! (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly, I don't understand the explanation or what the patch changes.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103
Re:Here's what the bug was! (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, from my reading of the patch which could be WAY the fuck wrong BTW, I think it is a race condition between the unlinking of a file and returning the inode to the pool AND the CP command ( copy a file ) traversing the inode list. In other words the CP command was trying to stat a file that was partially unlinked do to the update of the node list still being in progress.
If you still don't understand that don't feel bad, I had to read and re-read the note like 10 times before I probably got this explanation wrong.
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And I think you're wrong, there's no "rm" involved.
The removal is that the file details are being cleared from the memory cache and the cp is only looking in the cache for something it knew was there but hasn't locked yet. Because it wasn't locked another thread though it was a good candidate to be removed from the cache. The cp then assumed it was gone because something physically deleted it.
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LOL! I don't feel bad in the least. This is serious code not for the faint at heart. I was happy just to be able to even understand what they were talking about and my understanding is incomplete. I mean even the guy who found it wasn't sure if they should ignore everything he said about the proposed fix or even the problem. Trust me I feel like I am in pretty damn good company.
I have been actively working at trying to grasp the the kernel code for 2 years now and while I feel comfortable with some of
Good. (Score:2)
Don't rush. Get those nasty bugs squished. :)
Here's what the bug was! (Score:5, Informative)
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103 [lkml.org]
[Posted by Theovon earlier, but I prefer a clickable link.]
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The solution to this is really Obviously Correct; I don't know why they didn't post the bug in the summary:
That -ENOENT in walk_component: isn't it assuming we found a negative
dentry, before reaching the read_seqcount_retry which complete_walk
(or nameidata_drop_rcu_last before 3.0) would use to confirm a successful
lookup? And can't memory pressure prune a dentry, coming to dentry_kill
which __d_drops to unhash before dentry_iput resets d_inode to NULL, but
the dentry_rcuwalk_barrier between those is ineffective if the other end
ignores the seqcount?
The emperor isn't wearing any clothes (Score:2, Flamebait)
I bet this mysterious bug is actually caused by a build script trying to pry source code from the bottomless pit of horror that is Git. One could qualify that as an "incredibly subtle pathname lookup bug"...
For everything besides committing, Git is horrible. This thing is actually making SourceSafe looks trusty and convenient.
Now that the world is running on Linux (except for MySpace and GoDaddy) it is a crime to impede its evolution by using such a painful system. Down with Git, and long live Anything Else
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That's IT! You are off Linus's Christmas list for sure buddy!
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It can take time for some people to get used to git ("wait the commands aren't exactly the same as CVS!? noooooooooo...").
But once it clicks, you'll never want to go back.
There's a good reason git is by far the most popular "new generation" source-control system (and no, it's not "because Linus is popular"). It's simply more powerful, more facile, more nimble than the competition.
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there must be something better
Mercurial [selenic.com]
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I think he meant agile, though 'facile' is actually French for 'easy'.
Phillip.
Re:The emperor isn't wearing any clothes (Score:4, Insightful)
For everything besides committing, Git is horrible
It would be nice to know what you had a problem with. People here could perhaps enlighten you as to why things aren't working out for you, or you could enlighten them as to why git is inferior. It has its flaws (chiefly obscure error messages), but I've found it a better fit than cvs and svn.
System is stable enough (Score:2)
... to wait until then! XD
Linus Torvalds and Google+ (Score:2)
...A recent Google+ Post by Linus Torvalds...
When the fuck did this happen!?
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Recently.
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Beautiful.
HTML? You fail it (Score:2)
You linked the wrong text. The link is to the google+ entry, and that is the text that should be highlighted.
I bet your website requires javascript too.
Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0 (Score:5, Funny)
No, only firefox does that.
Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0 (Score:5, Funny)
You are confused. This is the Kernel, not Firefox.
BTW: I heard the guys at Mozilla are working on a new feature: The ability to change the version number while the browser is running. That's real progress.
Re:If it's a patch applied to 3.0 (Score:5, Funny)
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Doesn't Google already have a patent on that for Chrome?
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No emacth is best!
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BTW: I heard the guys at Mozilla are working on a new feature: The ability to change the version number while the browser is running. That's real progress.
That is true. They still do require you to restart the browser after that happens, however, so that extensions would properly stop working as they should.
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Reading this in chrome, laughing like hell ;)
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Why would one be concerned about extensions if he can't use anything more than (a less functional version of) AdBlock to start with?
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All webserver and database software will go, then so will email, then windows software will start breaking. Every human on Earth will go mad, then the planet will descend into the sun, and finally the laws of physics themselves will become unstable and the universe will start generating paradoxes and fail utterly.
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That's because it is not an important release. How was the weather under that rock you've been for the last couple of months?
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1. It's Linux, you fool! ...and used a Google tool to do so. (Angels commence gentle strumming of harps.) ...one that competes with the evil Facebook. (Lo, Satan is vanquished.)
2. This is Slashdot.
3. For bonus points - Linus commented on it. (Angels sing in glorious dulcet tones.)
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Q.E.D. I mean, really...