Linux 3.0 -rc1

“Yay! Let the bikeshed painting discussions about version
numbering begin (or at least re-start).

I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version
3.0. It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which
is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just
that I can no longe rcomfortably count as high as 40.

The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit,
and there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let’s face it
– what’s the point of being in charge if you can’t pick the bike
shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I’m just going
all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You’ll like it.

Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does not actually extend to all the
scripts and Makefile rules, so the kernel is fighting back, and is
calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We’ll have the usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle
it into submission, and get scripts etc cleaned up, and the final
release should be just “3.0”. The -stable team can use the third
number for their versioning.

So what are the big changes?

NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds
driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that
3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a
KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new
features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based
releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If
you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at
the time-based one (“20 years”) instead.

Complete
Story