On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 14:41 +0200, Marc Brockschmidt wrote: > Heya, > > As announced on dda [RT1], we want to get an impression when releasing > Squeeze is feasible. We have proposed a (quite ambitious) freeze in December > 2009, and some developers have noted that their planned changes wouldn't be > possible in this time frame. So, to find out when releasing would work for > most people, it would be great if you could answer the following questions: > > * Which major upstream releases of the linux kernel are expected in the > next two years? Which of those are material for Debian stable, which > might be a bit flaky?
There are no new major versions of the kernel. There is a new "stable"
minor version about every 3 months, which includes all changes that were
considered ready following the last release. Sub-minor versions
("stable updates") fixing critical bugs are released every few weeks for
the current minor version and for some prior minor versions. Long-term
support for any version is left to distributors.
> * How many "big" transitions will the upcoming changes cause? When should
> those
> happen? Can we do something to make them easier?
Transitions are generally gradual and we can often control them with
build configuration options to enable or disable backward-compatibility
features. Transitions should generally be documented in
Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt.
Looking at that now, I see the following potentially disruptive removals
that may occur before squeeze freeze. I have ignored removals that I
know we're ready for.
- Old wireless regulatory domain configuration
- user-space needs to use a new API to specify which country's rules to use;
I don't know whether this is in place yet
- Video4Linux API 1
- user-space should use version 2
- b43 support for firmware revision < 410
- maybe we should distribute new firmware
- Ability for non root users to shm_get hugetlb pages based on mlock resource
limits
Changes to specific drivers are less well documented and may in some
cases cause real problems at upgrade time.
Ben.
--
Ben Hutchings
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
- John Lehman, Secretary of the US Navy 1981-1987
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