Linus Torvalds Still Deciding Linux 3.20 vs. Linux 4.0

[duby229]

Version numbers as a whole are completely arbitrary anyway, they matter yes (in relation to eachother) but they as a whole scheme are arbitrary. There's no "pointless breakage" either, apps that only check for "2.6.x" or "2.4.x" broke anyway during the shift to 3.x. Any app written to take account for 3.0 should've been written to take into account for the fact that the version number is subject to change as shown by the move from 2.6.x to 3.x. If anything breaks at this point it is completely the developer's fault as they were warned.

I really don't get all the hate that surrounds version numbers, whether it be the kernel or anything else. We've hit the point technologically where there aren't revolutionary releases and everything is more evolutionary-- release early and release often. Plus the benefit of Linus' "Dont break shit" policy in the kernel means that there would likely never be a "We broke everything. Major version bump." release anyway. The last time that happened was like 2004 during the switch from 2.4 to 2.6-- 11yrs ago. (God 2004 was 11 years ago...)

I remember those times before 2.6. Every even numbered release was "stable" and every odd numbered release was "testing". Starting at 2.0 and 2.1, then 2.1 became 2.2, etc, until 2.5 became 2.6. That's when Torvalds really decided it was time to stop breaking shit. That's when 2.6 became a rolling release.

[Helios747]

You might want to look at open-vm-tools. Majority of distros package that, it's open source guest extensions for VMware

I'm talking about the host modules VMWare requires to run.

[Ericg]

I remember those times before 2.6. Every even numbered release was "stable" and every odd numbered release was "testing". Starting at 2.0 and 2.1, then 2.1 became 2.2, etc, until 2.5 became 2.6. That's when Torvalds really decided it was time to stop breaking shit. That's when 2.6 became a rolling release.

Yeah the GTK / GNU release style.. never really got the point of it, like it just seems like it'd be confusing for newcomers since theyd be trying to find the odd numbered versions naturally assuming that it goes 2.0 --> 2.1 --> 2.2. But that's a different topic entirely lol

[duby229]

Yeah the GTK / GNU release style.. never really got the point of it, like it just seems like it'd be confusing for newcomers since theyd be trying to find the odd numbered versions naturally assuming that it goes 2.0 --> 2.1 --> 2.2. But that's a different topic entirely lol

As far as I'm concerned they are 11 years behind schedule. That type of release cycle encourages breakage mentlity. After all, they can do what they want, if the user wants an unbroken version they can just use the last version. But little do they realize that only leads to every version being incompatible with every version.

[nanonyme]

I'm talking about the host modules VMWare requires to run.

Oh, so you're actually running Linux as VMware Player host? Interesting, never heard before of anyone having done that

[SystemCrasher]

And pls don't respond with "Well VMWare's bad, it's not open source", I really don't care.

And Linux devs usually do not care about proprietary stuff related to kernel. It kinda to easy to guess who will prevail. So whoever tells "%s is bad, it is not open source" just being yet another Captain Obvious. Nothing more, nothing less. But of course you have each and every right to learn simple things hard way.

[brosis]

No shit!? Now some anime I've been watching makes more sense.

Four elements are an even, balanced system, hence stop moving. Missing fifth element, wood (aka spirit), is missing, which brings chaos and disbalance, and movement.
Also, DX skipped four exactly due to this, but LibreOffice seems fine...

[waxhead]

It does actually make sense if you think about like this.....

Adding up all the changes between 3.0 and 3.20 accumulates to a ton of change. It's the accumulation of change that warrants the major version change.

I would say that if it breaks backwards compatibility it is worth a version bump. Everything else is incremental and should be considered a revision.

[steveriley]

Number 4 is UNLUCKY. Four and Death both sound same in Japanese (Shi).

Someone in Linus' G+ thread mentioned the same thing for the Chinese language.

Four elements are an even, balanced system, hence stop moving. Missing fifth element, wood (aka spirit), is missing, which brings chaos and disbalance, and movement.

But it's all just fake superstitious bullshit. Like someone claiming the Ubuntu launcher icon swirled the "wrong" way.

[rdnetto]

I dont understand why they use this versioning scheme if it does not fit the purpose. Why major version gets bumped if there are no big/breaking changes is beyond me. Confusing numbers is lame excuse... Since kernel development is incremental why dont they just adopt same version numbering like ff/chrome/systemd...

Systemd's versioning approach makes sense given the incremental anture of kernel development, but the kernel can't switch to it because that would break existing infrastructure that compares version numbers. Given that, the best option is to prefix a systemd-style version number with '3.', which means we'd eventually end up with 3.214, etc. That's actually not too bad - part of the problem with the 2.6.35 style version numbers was that the '2.6' part was long enough to be cumbersome, but a single 3 is pretty easy to remember. Arbitrarily increasing the major number just to keep the numbers small seems clunky, and eventually you'll end up with 214.18 and the same problem all over again...