Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 02:49:57 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org>, Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Salon article on BSD Message-ID: <20000519024957.B27571@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <200005182032.NAA21198@usr08.primenet.com>; from tlambert@primenet.com on Thu, May 18, 2000 at 08:32:17PM %2B0000 References: <20000517214857.A80602@mithrandr.moria.org> <200005182032.NAA21198@usr08.primenet.com>
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> No. Linux has nearly forked 3 times that I can document, and > has been builting towards such an event at least 5 additional > times. > > It's amazing to me that one could be a member of a society, yet > not study the properties of that society with all of the tools > at ones disposal. Even as someone who has only contributed to > Linux under various pseudonyms or by forwarding code through > other people, and thus a relative outsider, I definitely am > aware of "the Alan Cox tree" and "the GGI incident" (as examples). I'm somewhat out of my depths here. But let me try to understand what you're saying. Well, it's well known that Alan Cox (and several others working on various subsystems) maintain their own trees, and they pass their patches upwards through the hierarchy as and when they feel the patches are sufficiently well tested, and Linus is the last to receive the patches. And apart from the "stable" releases there are dozens of prepatch kernels and -ac and -aa and other kernels, even within the 2.2.x "stable" series, which fall somewhere between "stable" and "development". I've used some of these and they work -- the uptime of the machine is typically several weeks, ie until I feel like compiling a new kernel. An Alan Cox prepatch typically consists from patches from several developers (himself included) all put together and tested for a while on his tree. Those patches in turn have already been tested on their developers' trees. So all these prepatch kernel versions exist simultaneously with the "stable" release but contain features not found in the stable version, but they are reasonably safe that an ordinary user doesn't risk too much by using them on his machine. (Unlike the 2.3.x kernel series.) I don't think such a thing is possible in FreeBSD -- there's only -stable and -current -- or if other patches do exist, it's probably not so easy for an ordinary user to track them. To that extent maybe the linux system has its advantages, at least to people who like the linux way of life. Also, distributions like Red Hat/Caldera/Mandrake don't use a pristine "stable kernel" but include several patches relating to stuff like RAID, which Linus hasn't yet included in his releases. Can you say then that the linux kernel has already forked? Depends on the definition of forking -- the different forms of the kernel aren't diverging, they're just different threads that keep crisscrossing... > > I imagine that a CVS tree (of the Linux kernel) would help a lot > > in keeping concurrent development of an alternate kernel with an > > increased number of committers (in the alternate kernel). > > I imagine it would fracture the Linux community into at least 5, > perhaps more, pieces. The Linux community, as the Internet's > largest society/organism to date (and thus worthy of scholarly > study for that reason alone, if no other) has outgrown the point > at which CVS, as it currently exists, would constrain its growth. You mean 5 or more people would start maintaining their own CVS trees, and as a result patches on one tree would no longer work on the other trees and it would all start moving apart? Probably true. Rahul. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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