On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 15:41 -0500, Patrick Goetz wrote: > Flávio Etrusco wrote: > > Seriously? Ubuntu is not only about techies, it's about general > > use(rs) and businesses too. They have to have a solid and well-tested > > base. > > If you really wanna know what you're actually getting, you have the > > sources and the changelogs. > > It's not clear to me how a handful of folks at Canonical or RedHat > splicing and dicing kernel code from one version into another > necessarily gives you greater stability than an officially released > kernel that has been thoroughly tested by thousands of kernel hackers....
First, it's not just a "handful of folks". You should read up on the testing labs that both Canonical and Red Hat have in place. I wonder, these days, how many people _really_ compile their own kernel directly from kernel.org anymore? Obviously the kernel devs do it, and probably some folks using more "tuner" distros like Gentoo. But how many is that? I used to do it all the time but it's been years since I needed some new feature enough to spend the effort of compiling my own kernel, rather than just using what came with my distro and waiting a few months for the next distro release. Second, the 2.6.32 kernel has been declared to be a long-term stable kernel candidate by the kernel.org development team (Greg K-H), which means that it will have important fixes regularly backported to it from newer kernels by the kernel.org folks as well as RH/Canonical/etc., for much longer than normal kernels. Third, all indications are that Red Hat is going to base Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on the 2.6.32 kernel, which means it will get very long-term support (Red Hat EL 5 is based on 2.6.18, for example), just like Lucid's LTS designation. Actually 2.6.32 is, from a scheduling standpoint, just about the most perfect choice of a kernel for Lucid there could be. > But you're right, I can always just compile my own kernel, and the most > stable kernels I've used are ones I compiled from kernel.org source. > But then I have worry about doing all my own security patches and > maintenance until such time as I upgrade the distro. Or I can pour over > the Ubuntu kernel source package diffs in my spare time hoping to figure > out if some feature has been backported. Allow me to cut to the chase > and declare my original question to unsatisfactorily addressed. You've had bad luck with distro kernels then. As above, it's been years since a kernel failed on me badly enough to want to build my own. Every new kernel improves many things, it's true: but it's equally true that it breaks many things. To commit to providing the latest kernel always is to simply get on a treadmill that never ends: every upgrade gives you an entirely fresh new set of problems. Every distro I've ever heard of understands this and that's why they never upgrade major software versions, including the kernel, until the next release. Any serious problems discovered have fixes backported instead: that way you are always improving in quality (until the next release anyway) instead of jiggling up and down around the same level. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
