"We should have one week between -rc releases, but I was gone for a week over thanksgiving (as were some other kernel developers), so this one is a bit late. It's been almost the rule rather than the exception, but I promise I'll be better..." began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.24-rc4 kernel. He noted, "there aren't a lot of exciting changes here, but there's still a _lot_ more churn than I really hoped for at the -rc4 stage. Blackfin, MIPS and Power do stand out in the diffstats, but ARM and x86 got some updates too." Linus continued:
"And we had some ACPI churn (processor throttling etc), along with various driver updates: ATA, IDE, infiniband, SCSI, USB and network drivers.. And on the filesystem side, cifs, NFS, ocfs2 and proc. Ugh. Too much. [...] That said, none of the changes are really _exciting_ or really scary. And we should have fixed a number of regressions, although more certainly remain."
From: Linus Torvalds
Subject: Linux 2.6.24-rc4
Date: Dec 3, 10:08 pm 2007
We should have one week between -rc releases, but I was gone for a week
over thanksgiving (as were some other kernel developers), so this one is a
bit late. It's been almost the rule rather than the exception, but I
promise I'll be better...
Anyway, there aren't a lot of exciting changes here, but there's still a
_lot_ more churn than I really hoped for at the -rc4 stage. Blackfin, MIPS
and Power do stand out in the diffstats, but ARM and x86 got some updates
too.
And we had some ACPI churn (processor throttling etc), along with various
driver updates: ATA, IDE, infiniband, SCSI, USB and network drivers.. And
on the filesystem side, cifs, NFS, ocfs2 and proc. Ugh. Too much.
In fact, the diff from -rc3 is almost 36,000 lines, and that's the smaller
git one with the renames shown as renames (not the ones I upload as
patches to kernel.org - those are done so that people with GNU patch and
other legacy patch programs can use the diffs). I'll blame the two-week
window for some of it, but even so, this is a bit disheartening. I'm
really hoping that we're slowing down and -rc5 won't be anywhere near that
large.
That said, none of the changes are really _exciting_ or really scary. And
we should have fixed a number of regressions, although more certainly
remain.
Linus
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Is it me or does Linus seem
Is it me or does Linus seem a bit bored with these -rc releases ?
Are you sure you don't
Are you sure you don't mistake his nice and dry humour for boredom?
What do you mean? If aliens
What do you mean? If aliens land on Earth, these changes arent interesting to them.
Once it is used in something BIG to GOOD EFFECT are these changes suddenly IMPORTANT.
RC is release candidate!
Why should he expect to see something exciting on an rc?Shouldn't it be just bug fixing and release stabilization?
He doesn't, and he sounds
He doesn't, and he sounds happy there isn't.
Not really scary
Nothing wrong with "not really scary." The SATA and USB drivers have improved a lot in the past year. My question is what new planned features would lead to the 2.7 series?
Have you missed it?
This is the 2.7 series, effectively. (Well, if you believe the trolls, it's the 2.5 series still...)
After being in the 2.6 series for just about 4 years now, I think it's safe to say 2.7 will happen whenever the kernel developers decide it's time to switch up their development model again, not based on a push for some great new feature.
--
Program Intellivision and play Space Patrol!
Hell
Wasn't there something like "when the hell freezes"?
Hmmm...
I thought the Eagles already got back together?
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Program Intellivision and play Space Patrol!