Re: Are Debian's 2.6 kernels stable?
'ello,
Not really an answer to your question, but I am also quite concerned
about this, being forced to use 2.6 now on my latest box due to hardware
compatibility issues.
IMHO, it seems totally unfair to community efforts like Debian that they
can now look forward to spending more time on patching and testing
something that really should be stable when released as such and less
time packaging and improving the infrastructure that supports the
project.
I really hope I am over-reacting on this -- only time will tell, of
course -- but it seems to me that this decision will benefit
corporations far more than it will the individual geek or community
projects. I mean, each big company can stabilise/optimise the kernel in
a different area and thus carve out more of a niche for themselves in
the market. It seems to me that the companies will be very pleased with
this decision in time.
(Yes, I realise it is GPL so in theory everyone's entitled to any
company's changes, but if the unstable-ness is such that patches are
extensive (or binary modules can be used to provide missing features),
they may not be compatible with other companies' development policies.)
But then I suppose something like this was always bound to happen. When
Linux eventually becomes a _really_ popular OS, true geeks won't want to
be seen using it and will move to Hurd, BSD or write something else.
Also, when it is more popular we'll see how secure it really is (or
isn't), just as with Sendmail et al...
>From what I've read, 2.6.8 (and probably the next few) are not going to
be totally unstable. I expect we won't see the full ramifications of
the decision for a while yet. You never know, forks are in fashion at
the moment so we may see some big changes ahead...
</rant> :-)
bye just now,
--
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew@agrip.org.uk>
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