On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 10:05:23PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
As part of one of the Linux kernel Summit discussions today, it was brought up that after a kernel is released (for example 3.5), it's a bit too late to be doing testing to see how well it is working out. The .0 release is usually a bit rough, and it takes until the .1 or .2 release to get most major issues out of the way.
So, the kernel developers would like to get a wider range of testing, and one thing proposed would be to have rolling distros switch their kernel over a bit earlier to the new release than they had been doing. Specifically, around the -rc5 point in time would be great. That way, any reported regressions could be fixed sooner and get into the final .0 release for everyone to use.
Now this does place a bit of a larger burden on the users of those distros to be diligent in reporting problems, and the distro engineers to report the issues upstream as well, but it sounds like a reasonable thing to try out.
So, for the next kernel release, I'm thinking of switching the kernel in Tumbleweed over to 3.6 at the -rc5 timeframe. Does anyone strongly object to this happening?
No objection but a hint from the RPM packaging side we can share from our Samba packaging service. We provide alpha, beta, and RC version there¹ too. And this causes trouble to RPM as 3.6.0-rc5 is always larger than the final 3.6.0 from the alphanum comparison. This is a limitation of RPM. Some might suggest to use the epoch feature but even that would not help at the long run.² Anyhow, we've found a dirty solution for the alpha, beta, RC suffix. We tweak with the RPM version string. By this the RPM has 3.6.0 in the resulting filename while the binaries identify themself as 3.6.0-rc5 at startup with -V or in the log files. That's enough to identify a alpha, beta, or RC relase. As soon as the final 3.6.0 got published we update network:/samba:/STABLE/ and ensure to use a release greater than the last one we used with the last one used in the network:/samba:/TESTING/ We might only use an rpm unfriendly string (3.6.0rc5 compared to 3.6.0-rc5). If that's the case sorry for the noise. Cheers, Lars ¹ http://download.openSUSE.org/repositories/network:/samba:/TESTING/ ² The limitations defined by the SUSE packaging rules are a different topic. -- Lars Müller [ˈlaː(r)z ˈmʏlɐ] Samba Team + SUSE Labs SUSE Linux, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany