New kernel versioning scheme

mrsteven · Veteran Joined: 04 Jul 2003 Posts: 1938

Since the kernel developers have changed the kernel versioning scheme, I wonder how this will be handled by the Gentoo developers. Now that 2.6.11.2 is released, will it be included into portage?

Besides, what do you think about this new scheme? I'm afraid that the new 2.6.x kernels won't gain enough testing before they will be released for the public and it would be unclear if a kernel is stable or not.
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kimczuba · Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 7:24 pm Post subject:

I agree with your concern, it would have been better if 2.6.uneven meant new feature(s) version, and 2.6.even meant bugfix release as proposed by Torvalds. But we will have to wait and see whether the new scheme works in practice....
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Zb7 · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 30

mrsteven · Veteran Joined: 04 Jul 2003 Posts: 1938

So it's more like the 2.6.8.1 release? Then the 2.6.x.y releases are just small bugfixes that wipe out some minor bugs. That will be great, but only if these bugfixes also go into the 2.6.x series. That would improve stability and kill some bugs. But if these fixes must go into the 2.6.x releases, otherwise we'll have several throw-away kernel versions...

I hope the new model works and I think the developers are smart enough to change it if it doesn't work.
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castorilo · Apprentice Joined: 25 Dec 2002 Posts: 157

I understand they don't want to inflate versions, but this is starting to get ridiculous.

After all these years, we still are at version 2, wtf??? as in there is not much difference between 2.0.x and 2.6.x, they are all in the same league.

So now, it is 4 numbers, release candidate and the tree (if we are not talking about mainline). so expect things like
vanilla-sources-2.6.11.2-r1

The problem I see with this is that it is starting to get tough to remember what version you are running in which machine.

Kudos to KDE, they keep it very simple, their version is A.B.C where A changes if binary compatibility changes. B changes if there are new features and C changes if it is just bug fixes.

Kudos to Gentoo. They also keep it simple: A.B where A is the year and B is the release # of that year. This is great because it gives you an idea of when it was released and is very easy to remember.

I understand the need of the kernel of releasing versions very frequently and releasing development versions. But as it stands right now the first number is pretty much totally unneeded, they are ALL version 2 (I know there was version 1, but that was a long time ago).

yokem55 · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 360 Location: Oregon

At least the kernel versioning is better than what goes on around java. You have version 2 of the whole fricken language/platform (J2EE), the version number of the jdk/jre (1.4.02), and now to make things even clearer, Sun has decided that the '1' in the jdk/jre version is no longer needed and now calls jdk-1.5 "Java 5".

/dev/random · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 1:09 am Post subject:

rhill · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 3:47 am Post subject:

A.B.C.D

A: complete rewrite/break backward compat
B: major feature change
C: periodic release incremental
D: dinky bug fixes

it's the same way gentoo has released kernels (eg. 2.6.10-r7), just now the kernel guys are the ones doing the -r bumps.

i'm just wondering how they're going to build up enough momentum to break off of 2.6. and when they do, is that 2.7 or 2.8?

*awaiting kernel 2.6.12.0_rc4-r1
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/dev/random · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 3:52 am Post subject:

castorilo · Apprentice Joined: 25 Dec 2002 Posts: 157

/dev/random · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 6:18 am Post subject:

My mistake. What do you mean by KISS?

arnvidr · l33t Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 629 Location: Oslo, Norway

RedDawn · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 9:35 am Post subject:

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

nevynxxx · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 1:30 pm Post subject:

From reading as much of the thread on LKML as I get time for, as I understand it, they are effectivly *not* changing anything.

That is the beauty. The number/release scheme is exactly the same as before as far as Linus is concerned.

What they have done is add a group of people who release a "stable" series of kernels.

This series gets only fixes (and it really is only fixes, there are lots of rules about that).

This is so that distributers can (if they choose) pick a x.y.z.n release to go with. They know it is reasonably stable.

If you don't care about having a stable kernel, nothing has changed.

If you do, you have a chance now of getting it.
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petrjanda · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 1:54 pm Post subject:

Imho, it should be like this: development tree 3.x.x and stable tree 2.x.x, and when 3.x.x becomes stable it should jump to 4.x.x.
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Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2071

I'm in favor for the Gentoo versioning scheme: we would have 2005.2 now and perhaps 2005.10 at the end of the year