

Linux 2.8.0? - al3xbio
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/63589

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nathanb
My two cents are that switching to a date-based version system would be the
wrong move.

Linux has not been extraordinarily successful at penetrating the desktop
market. Where a lot of Linux lives is in the datacenter or the server farm.
And if I'm a corporate IT drone, I want to know what is a major, disruptive
upgrade and what is a minor upgrade. If you give such a person a CD labeled
2.8.0, it will be viewed with much more suspicion than one labeled 2.6.40, and
rightly so. If you give one labeled 3.0, it will be filed in the dustbin until
those zeros have become twos. Nobody's going to deploy a dot zero in a
production environment.

Thus, giving the kernel what appears to be a big version bump for what is
effectively a minor upgrade is going to freak out a lot of IT guys for no good
reason. I remember IT shops which still ran 2.4 back in 2005ish because 2.6
was still 'too new'.

(Whether this attitude is legitimate or not is another question entirely).

~~~
ghshephard
There are two categories of people - those who are sophisticated enough to
know that linux kernels these days are all fairly mature, and, what the
.stable branch is, and those who aren't and use the kernel supplied by their
Linux Distributor, and will, of course, be coddled with an appropriately safe
version brand. RHEL 6, Ubuntu 11.04, etc...

Neither of those groups will be negatively impacted by setting the kernel
version to 2.8 (or 3.0)

~~~
kcbanner
Exactly. Most decent admins will be watching these lists and know the
reasoning behind this decision.

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enneff
> so that I can avoid having to make the -rc1 release from Japan using my slow
> laptop

Linus can't just shell into a faster machine somewhere?

~~~
hartror
Exactly my thoughts!

Edit: Given the lack of visible points a comment is needed to signal to others
that others do agree with the comment. How would you like me to phrase it?

~~~
sliverstorm
We would like you to phrase it by abandoning the idea that "me-too" comments
are somehow suddenly appropriate.

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telemachos
> _but when the voices tell me to do things, I listen._

Either deeply terrifying or words to live by. I can't decide.

~~~
evangineer
That's Linus' sense of humour showing through. If you like, you could see it
as him listening to his wizardly maker's intuition.

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al3xbio
There's also an article on Phoronix ->
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQ3N...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQ3NQ)

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cpeterso
Linus should just drop the 2.6 prefix and go with "Linux 40" (like Solaris 10
is SunOS 5.10). Then the stable kernel releases can be "Linux 40.x".

~~~
VMG
Then he couldn't do an major redesign of the kernel interface and signal it in
the version id.

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sjwright
Unthreaded view: <http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/63589>

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zbowling
It sounds like he is toying with 3.0 in the comments later on.

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lion0
So 2.8.0 is not really going to be a feature release? Seems strange.

~~~
cookiecaper
If you're familiar with kernel releases it seems pretty normal to me. There
have been some really major features merged in normal 2.6.x releases. I think
they gave up long ago on trying to decide when a feature is cool and/or big
enough to constitute a big version bump. It seems likely that they would
increment it just to mix things up, not because of features.

Though my personal preference eliminates the dots all together (except for
post-facto stable release (e.g. 2.6.39.2)), so the kernel released next would
be kernel 3, the kernel released 3 mo later would be 4, and so on.

