Thanks Roland, On Tuesday 26 June 2007 21:03, Roland Kuhn wrote: > On 26 Jun 2007, at 16:37, Zoltán HUBERT wrote: > > Whatever "stable" means. > > What you mean by "stable" pretty much excludes any > serious development, without which the Linux kernel would > very soon be obsolete. If you want a stable system, then > don't change it.
This is a problem. Do you remember that kernel vulnerability in 2.4 that made the Debian servers be attacked ? And mplayerhq.hu too if I remember right ? So what are we supposed to do with a perfect and optimised system, running smoothly, with an older kernel where some nasty bug is discovered ? In MacOS X, you click "System Update" and you're done. In Linux, I expect "download the newest stable kernel, configure, compile, install, reboot". If I have to rely on the distribution to help me it spoils the whole benefit of open source. I don't trust Novell or RedHat or Google more than Microsoft or Apple. You "kernel developpers" are the keepers of the flame. > If you update to a kernel which is 2.5 > years newer, you simply cannot have stability, because > that would mean stagnation, aka "death". PostScript is a very old language yet we all still use it every day. HTML is a very old "thing" and we use it every-day, and it's still compatible with newer and older stuff. I'm a system engineer, and a "stable" system is one where the interfaces are stable. Individual components can change, and do change, but if you change fundamental interfaces it is not the same system. Of course I understand that "sometimes" fundamental things have to change, but here "sometimes" is the keyword. If its "anytime" it simply is no stable system. And yes, designing and maintaining interfaces is a very difficult job. I don't remember how it was during 2.4 and before, but I find it very suspicious that SuSE and RedHat only provide 2.6.10 and 2.6.9 for their OS. It looks as if THEY didn't trust 2.6.x to be a replacement to 2.6.y And as I understand it, this is (was ?) the whole point of stable/development kernels. "We" can trust a newer stable kernel to be a drop-in replacement for an older stable kernel (from the same series), while development kernels need time to stabilise with the new whizz-bang-pfouit stuff that you all so nicely add. Are the good ol' days lost in nostalgia ? bye Zoltán -- ________________________ Zoltan ________________________ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
