"Marc A. Ohmann" <marc at ds6.net> writes:

> Its a great debate but who does everyone expect to do the testing?  In this model the early adopters are the testers.  Linus only tests code for _his_ machine if he compiles it at all.  What happened is obviously an accident but before people complain they should download, test, report and offer something productive or simply don't complain.  If someone doesn't like the way the branch is maintained fork.  

I tend to agree with you here, but it seems in the recent past there have been
a couple of serious bugs, breaking USB support in the early 2.4.x kernels,
2.4.11 and 2.4.15, in the stable branch.  I've been following the stable
branch for about 5 years and I don't remember such serious bugs appearing in
this branch until recently.  Maybe it's because things in the kernel are
getting that much more complex, but I don't want to have to do the same thing
with kernels that I do with RedHat distributions; wait for the next couple of
versions to make sure all the bugs are worked out, this is what I thought the
development branch was for (I could be wrong here).

> Complaining and not downloading the most recent releases is probably the most unproductive thing a person could do.

Oh I've downloaded it and compiled it and had just booted it when I saw the
post on Slashdot.  Had I not read that right away I could've lost data, which
I might expect from a development kernel, but not in the stable branch.

-- 
Jon Schewe | http://mtu.net/~jpschewe | jpschewe at mtu.net
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels 
nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any 
powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all 
creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that 
is in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:38-39