“I’m taking a few days off – when I get back I
expect to take this current 2.2.0-final and just remove the
“-final” from the Makefile, and that will be it.” — Linus
Torvalds
Today, Linus Torvalds announced to the Linux-kernel mailing list
that the latest “linux-2.2.0-pre9” kernel is actually the
2.2.0-final release.
His words:
From: Linus Torvalds
Hoya,
there’s now a 2.2.0-pre9 on ftp.kernel.org, and when you compile
it it will call itself 2.2.0-final. The reason is fairly obvious:
enough is enough, and I can’t make pre-kernels forever, it just
dilutes the whole idea. The only reason the tar-file is not called
2.2.0 is that I want to avoid having any embarrassing typos that
cause it to not compile under reasonable configurations or
something like that. Unreasonable configurations I no longer care
about.
Every program has bugs, and I’m sure there are still bugs in
this. Get over it – we’ve done our best, and nobody ever believed
that there wouldn’t be 2.2.x kernels to fix problems as they come
up, and delaying 2.2.0 forever is not an option.
I have a wedding anniversary and a company party coming up, so
I’m taking a few days off – when I get back I expect to take this
current 2.2.0-final and just remove the “-final” from the Makefile,
and that will be it. I suspect somebody _will_ find something
embarrassing enough that I would fix it too, but let’s basically
avoid planning on that.
In short, before you post a bug-report about 2.2.0-final, I’d
like you to have the following simple guidelines:
“Is this something Linus would be embarrassed enough about that
he would wear a brown paper bag over his head for a month?”
and
“Is this something that normal people would ever really care
deeply about?”
If the answer to either question is “probably not”, then please
consider just politely discussing it as a curiosity on the kernel
mailing lists rather than even sending email about it to me: I’ve
been too busy the last few weeks, and I’d really appreciate it if I
could just forget the worries of a release for a few days..
But if you find something hilariously stupid I did, feel free to
share it with me, and we’ll laugh about it together (and I’ll avoid
wearing the brown paper bag on my head during the month of
February). Do we have a deal?
I’ve seen people working on a 2.2.0 announcement, and I’m happy
– I’ve been too busy to think straight, much less worry about
details like that. If everything turns out ok, I’ll have a few
memorable bloopers in my mailbox but nothing worse than that, and I
can sit down and actually read the announcement texts that people
have been discussing.
ObFeatures:
- m68k sync
- various minor driver fixes (irda, net drivers, scsi, video,
isdn) - SGI Visual Workstation support
- adjtimex update to the latest standards
- vfat silly buglet fix
- semaphores work on alpha again
- drop the inline strstr() that gcc got wrong whatever we
did - kswapd needed to be a bit more aggressive
- minor TCP retransmission and delack fixes
Until Monday,
Linus