“A proposal to help Linus Torvalds keep up with patches for Linux has sparked a controversy over whether the operating system has outgrown its creator. On Monday, Rob Landley, a computer programmer, writer and Linux evangelist, posted a proposal to the Linux kernel development list calling for a “Patch Penguin”–a person who would help integrate fixes for the myriad of small problems that plague the current development kernel, Linux 2.5.” Read the rest of the story at C|Net News. In other Linux news, test kernel 2.5.3 was released yesterday.
The Need for a Patch Penguin
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Why a person? Why not use a program to manage bugs/patches for the kernel? Then reports could be run to find out what you missed? Bugzilla comes to mind. Comments could be posted if the patch does not meet standards. You can set priority levels and release levels. It just seems so much better than just sending emails around.
The problem is not sorting out the patches.
The problem is reviewing the patches and take TIME to test them and examine them. This is the real problem, not sorting out things. So you need a real person with lots of time in his hands, not a program.
it is silly to not use revision control on bigger projects/programs…
Well, why not a person? I am sure there are some folks out there who are competent and eager to help. I do not understand why there should be any objections to this at all. This is a good sign that Linux is growing. Linus must now take a more broader view of everything, and he must be careful not to box himself into a position where he starts impeding progress.
Understood. But, by having all the patches in a centralized place, would allow the entire community to do the testing, and post comments on the patch. Only Linus would be allowed to submit the patch, but if multiple developers got together to work on the patches, the patch might stand a better chance of being submitted by the time Linus gets around to going through them all.
Sorry I didn’t make myself clear on this in my first post. I just thought that making the review of patches a community process, would be better than the proposed one more person. And yes, I know they have the mailing lists, but things are already getting lost in the mail
I didn’t have the slightest idea of the Linux kernel being so hierarchically centralized in one person, I thought it was more “democratic”, that there was more choice for changes. I was surprised to read:
“In short, send patches to maintainers that you know I trust,” he said.
“If you cannot find a person to be a proponent of your patch, you should
ask yourself if the patch might have some problem.”
And “Part of the problem is that Linus’ way of rejecting things is to simply ignore them.”
Trust? Sounds to me like patch lobbying, like brotherhood, like masonry. I understand this is Linus baby, but really thought the kernel development was more open to the Linux community, that’s what I understood from reading Linus interviews. Is there a supreme kernel chief like that in FreeBSD?
it really is dead, it is plain old unix. 20 years agoi, it might have been cool, but it isn’t now,let’s stop trying to make look pretty. how about somehting modern?? something built on an exokernel for example!
now let’s put some links to the BeOS source code! i wanna look at it. i would really appreciate any help
thanks!
Linux isn’t unix, it’ s a unix *clone* – rewritten from scratch. And it has more life into it than BeOS for the time being. And honestly – basic OS design haven’t changed that much in the last 20 years.
Yeah, put up a link to the leaked source of BeOS and *really* fsck up OpenBeOS efforts of trying to rewrite it, brilliant, you clever man…
“Is there a supreme kernel chief like that in FreeBSD?”
huh? there ain’t no supreme kernel chief in FreeBSD, my friend.