Torvalds Bemoans Size of RC7 For Linux Kernel 3.5 158
alphadogg writes "A host of small modifications and a large number of system-on-a-chip and PowerPC fixes inflated the size of release candidate No. 7 for Version 3.5 of the Linux kernel, according to curator Linus Torvalds' RC7 announcement, made on Saturday. Torvalds wasn't happy with the extensive changes, most of which he said he received Friday and Saturday, saying 'not cool, guys' in the announcement. However, the occasionally combustible kernel curator didn't appear to view this as a major setback. 'Now, admittedly, most of this is pretty small. The loadavg calculation fix patch is pretty big, but quite a lot of that is added comments,' he wrote, referring to the subroutine that measures system workload."
Re:Hold on a second. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hold on a second. (Score:5, Informative)
Linus is mainly complaining because he wants bugfixes to come in during the merge window. The RC's are then used to iron out bugs that got added by features that were added during the merge window OR to fix existing bugs that were too invasive to fix in a normal 3.x.x update. The idea is that the change from 3.4 to 3.5-rc1 is massive, 3.5rc-1 to 3.5rc2 is smaller, 3.5rc2 to rc3 is even smaller. And it keeps getting smaller until the number of commits is very low, and those commits are very small changes themselves. This SHOULD have been 3.5 release, but instead a ton of large commits were done after rc6 and that makes Linus uncomfortable about labeling 3.5 as Stable until people have a change to test out those new commits. The more commits people do past like rc2, the longer the delay until 3.5 is marked as stable and released, honestly unless im forgetting something, I havent seen a 7th release candidate for any kernel since the change to 3.0, most of them have been capping around 5. By a 7th RC there shouldnt be really anything going on unless an email comes in that is labeled "URGENT KERNEL PANIC FIX" and from the sounds of it...none of these were that, and could have all been saved for the merge window for 3.6. Instead we have the 3.5 kernel delayed by another week.
Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Negative coding (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like the kernel could use a good refactoring.
Because too many people contributed too many patches during a window in the development cycle when not many (or large) patches should be contributed?
Umm... I think you didn't understand what the problem is here. It's a violation of development process protocol that has nothing to do with the quality of the code. Someone trying to submit refactoring patches would have made it much worse, not better. Actually, it wouldn't have been worse, because Linus would just have rejected them at this point in time.
Re:Why is this a story? (Score:5, Informative)
Are you sure you belong on
There are floppy disk Linux distributions. There has been for quite some time. Last I checked a floppy disk is only 1.44MB.
Let alone in 1992, a 8MB RAM system was on the higher end of a typical desktop.
Re:wow (Score:4, Informative)
Slackware is great for what it is. I remember working with it in the early 90s. I think Arch is also excellent. But none of these fill the same niche as RHEL.
I too used Slackware in the early nineties - after SLS [wikipedia.org] on its fifty-mumble floppy disks, Then I used Red Hat, Mandrake, and even Caldera before I found Debian in about 1996. Once you've used Debian, and the Debian package manager, you're never going to want to use anything else.