Takashi Iwai wrote:
At Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:10:00 -1000,
david wrote:
Arnold Krille wrote:
Am Montag, 6. August 2007 schrieb Fons Adriaensen:
I assume most drivers are using the same interfaces to the
kernel, and the same services, and that these are relatively
stable.
But I could be completely wrong...
Well, the kernel devs seem to change some interfaces rather often in binary
incompatible ways. And sometimes even on purpose (to drive away blob-drivers
like nvidia)...
So it can be that one of these changes introduced a bug hard to find and
affecting only very few drivers. And as the developers will probably all have
the lastest kernels, they don't want to wast time by debugging a problem
fixed two kernel versions ago just because the user has 2.6.4 installed and
doesn't use a half decent distro...
Note: a decent distro (I've used several) doesn't necessarily have the
"latest" kernel - cuz the latest may still be in the very unstable realm.
No more true. Distros nowadays try to pick up the latest one as much
as possible. Take a look at recent openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc.
Of course, it's adventurous to switch to early -rc kernel. But the
released kernel is supposed to be stable. This reduces the
maintenance a lot.
However, distros stick with the older kernel version for their
"business" products, mainly for keeping the 100% binary and source
compatibility, which many ISVs prefer.
IOW, it's just the matter of money :)
Well, I don't run any business distros.
I know I've switched to newer kernels in the past and had whole bunches
of devices quit working - for instance, had USB quit working completely.
On one, networking quit working entirely, too. So when some developer
tells me to "test again using the latest kernel," perhaps you understand
why I'm not exactly eager to go do that?
Yeah, I can understand it, of course. I have a bunch of machines with
older kernels, too. But, you understand that if no report back from
the tester, the bug will be left simply broken? Testing is a part of
development cycle, and testing on the same environment is the
important factor, as I mentioned.
It effects the developer's ability to duplicate the bug. I think it
behooves the developer to test on the environment the person reports the
bug on.
--
David
gnome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
authenticity, honesty, community
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