"Last month, at the kernel summit, there was discussion of putting a Reviewed-by: tag onto patches to document the oversight they had received on their way into the mainline," began Jonathan Corbet in an effort to define the meaning of the recently introduced reviewed-by tag. He continued, "that tag has made an occasional appearance since then, but there has not yet been a discussion of what it really means. So it has not yet brought a whole lot of value to the process."

In the continued discussion, it was requested that all commit tags be defined, prompting Jonathan to update his documentation to include Signed-off-by, Acked-by, Cc, and Tested-by along with his documentation for Reviewed-by. He offered the following definition for the new Reviewed-by tag:

"The patch has been reviewed and found acceptible according to the Reviewer's Statement as found at the bottom of this file. A Reviewed-by tag is a statement of opinion that the patch is an appropriate modification of the kernel without any remaining serious technical issues. Any interested reviewer (who has done the work) can offer a Reviewed-by tag for a patch."

An interesting thread on the lkml began when Greg KH submitted a patch for the 2.6 kernel saying, "Ok, to test out the new development model, here's a nice patch that simply removes the devfs code." This was quickly followed with a comment by Oliver Neukum who said, "may I point out that 2.6 is supposed to be a _stable_ series?" In one branch of the thread, the usefulness of devfs was examined.

In another thread, discussion was focused on this "new development model". Jonathan Corbet explained that Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton [interview] were very happy with the results of their recent teamwork, and saw no immediate pressure to fork a 2.7 development branch. On the contrary, they intend to keep at it as they've been, with things first going into Andrew's -mm patchset [story] for testing, then eventually being merged into the mainline 2.6 kernel. Jonathan went on to explain, "Andrew stated his willingness to consider, for example, four-level page tables, MODULE_PARM removal, API changes, and more. 2.7 will only be created when it becomes clear that there are sufficient patches which are truly disruptive enough to require it. When 2.7 *is* created, it could be highly experimental, and may turn out to be a throwaway tree." And he summarized:

"Andrew's vision, as expressed at the summit, is that the mainline kernel will be the fastest and most feature-rich kernel around, but not, necessarily, the most stable. Final stabilization is to be done by distributors (as happens now, really), but the distributors are expected to merge their patches quickly."