From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Oct 30 1:28:11 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from nef.ens.fr (nef.ens.fr [129.199.96.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 501AE37B401 for ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 01:28:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from corto.lpt.ens.fr (corto.lpt.ens.fr [129.199.122.2]) by nef.ens.fr (8.10.1/1.01.28121999) with ESMTP id f9U9S5l82829 ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 10:28:05 +0100 (CET) Received: from (rsidd@localhost) by corto.lpt.ens.fr (8.9.3/jtpda-5.3.1) id KAA62089 ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 10:28:04 +0100 (CET) Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 10:28:04 +0100 From: Rahul Siddharthan To: Giorgos Keramidas Cc: Bzdik BSD , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linux VM : forky? Message-ID: <20011030102804.B60885@lpt.ens.fr> Mail-Followup-To: Giorgos Keramidas , Bzdik BSD , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG References: <20011030012025.49292.qmail@web13605.mail.yahoo.com> <20011030051923.A36388@hades.hell.gr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20011030051923.A36388@hades.hell.gr>; from charon@labs.gr on Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 05:19:23AM +0200 X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE i386 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Giorgos Keramidas said on Oct 30, 2001 at 05:19:23: > On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 05:20:25PM -0800, Bzdik BSD wrote: > > > > http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1436/byt20011024s0002/1029_moshe.html > > Spreading FUD? :P > > Linux has not forked when other debates ragged for long either. > It is very unlikely it will now. One could argue that linux has forked many times. Presently, Linus does one set of releases, while Alan Cox does another (which are supposed to be more "bleeding edge" but many apparently prefer to run those). Several others maintain their own trees too. In addition, every distributor releases a customised kernel which is not a "vanilla" Linus kernel at all. And ports to other architecture (PowerPC, etc) tend to diverge a lot from Linus's tree. It looks to me like Linus remains a sort of focal point, and while all the various forks try to stay somewhat in sync with him and will not want to diverge too far, I think they are forks nonetheless, by any definition. In particular, the current VM situation looks like a fork, in effect, already. Whether there will be a re-merging remains to be seen... This proliferation of forks and patches is really a problem with linux. If you want a cool feature from somewhere, and another cool feature from somewhere else, chances are quite high that the patches will conflict... this was possible even 2 years ago, which was the last time I played with linux kernel patches etc (since then I've stuck with FreeBSD like a good boy), but has apparently become a lot worse now. Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message