Andrew Sullivan wrote:The reason there is a lot of backporting in Linux kernels is that there is such a lot of time (2 years or more) between major kernel releases. This is not surprising given the kernel's complexity, but it is not the case here, with releases every 6 months or so.
On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 09:17:16AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
What if the feature does break compatibility with old features?
What if it is "truly" a new feature?
There is _no_ mechanism in the community right now for testing all these new features in the so-called stable tree.
I have lately been taking the position that Linux is only a
second-best choice for production use, precisely because of the
constant introduction of shiny new features in the supposed stable
branch. Without using something like RHAS or Debian stable, I think
one is asking for trouble. One needs to do a great deal of testing
Agreed. Great Bridge was going to test our releases and only distribute the good ones --- obviously they were thinking of Linux kernels and not PostgreSQL. You almost need a commercial company to do testing with Linux kernels. PostgreSQL doesn't require this, and I think Linux is popular _in_ _spite_ of their buggy backported kernels (odd numbers?), not because of it.
In general I agree that only true bug fixes should go in later versions of official releases after they are out - if anyone wants to backpatch features they can, but then they wear the risk. Do it on GBorg if you like, but not in the main tree.
cheers
andrew
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