Re: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> Why would a shorter cycle be better?  What are we trying to achieve?

I don't think a shorter cycle is necessarily better, but I think we could 
try having a more "directed" cycle, and perhaps merge certain specific 
things rather than everything.

That would possibly _cause_ a shorter cycle, if only because the problems 
are hopefully more focused from the fact that we merged with a certain 
focus.

Of course, it would likely just frustrate the people who didn't get 
merged, and would need to wait for the next cycle. So it might be a net 
negative, even if we'd bring individual cycles in a bit.

> > The cycles seem to be stretching out again, and I don't really think 
> > it's worth it to hold up the entire kernel for every single piddly 
> > little regression to get fixed.  We'll _never_ be perfect, even if we 
> > weren't slackers.

I think that's true. 2.6.18 got delayed partly due to me beign away, but I 
also think that it then got delayed too much afterwards too, just because 
I felt a bit nervous about having been away ;)

So it definitely stretched out too much.

Whether there is a lot we can do about it, I dunno. In many ways, the real 
issue is simply that we have a lot of changes. And people are _never_ as 
interested in the testing part as they were in writing new code..

		Linus
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