On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> wrote: > On Sunday 21 Aug 2016 05:55:06 Rich Freeman wrote: >> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 5:12 AM, Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> > wrote: >> > After this morning's sync, both versions 4.4.6 and 4.6.4 of >> > gentoo-sources have disappeared. Is this just finger trouble in the >> > server chain? I get the same with UK and US sync servers. >> >> No idea, but upstream is up to 4.4.19, and 4.6.7 (which is now EOL). >> So, those are pretty old versions. I see 4.4.19 in the Gentoo repo, >> and 4.7.2 (which is probably where 4.6 users should be moving to). > > Yes, this ~amd64 box is now at 4.7.2, but I have an amd64 and two x86 > systems and they both want to downgrade to 4.1.15-r1, which eix shows as the > latest stable version. > > I thought 4.4.6 and 4.6.4 were both pretty stable; was I wrong? >
I'm sure they both work. However, upstream has released numerous fixes since 4.4.6, and they will not be releasing security/bug/etc fixes for 4.6.x. As long as there are no critical issues there is no issue with not being completely up-to-date with the kernel's stable releases, and I'm sure the Gentoo kernel team is tracking these sorts of issues. However, it isn't a surprise that they dropped 4.6. If they downgraded 4.1 I suspect that was a mistake somewhere along the ways - I could see them upgrading it to something more recent. And there is nothing wrong with having some internal QA on kernel releases. 4.1 had a nasty memory leak a release or two ago that was killing my system after only an hour or two uptime. They took over a week to stabilize the fix as well (though a patch was out fairly quickly). So, I'm not in nearly the rush to update kernels as I used to be (granted, unless you read all the lists it is easy to miss this sort of thing). I really wish the kernel had separate announce/discussion/patch lists. It is really annoying that there is no way to get official notices up upstream updates without subscribing to lkml and such. Is Linux the only FOSS project that has never heard of -announce lists? I ended up bailing on gentoo-sources all the same. Not that there was really anything wrong with it, but since I'm running btrfs and they've had a history of nasty regressions that tend to show up MONTHS later I've been a lot more picky about my kernel updates. I'm currently tracking 4.1. I might think about moving to 4.4 in a little while. I tend to stay on the next-to-most-recent longterm not long after a new longterm is announced. That tends to give them enough time to work out the bugs. Plus, I spend a lot less time playing with configuration options this way (they don't change within a minor version). -- Rich
