Havoc's Blog

I’m kind of amused by this discussion
of kernel backports.

As I pointed out
earlier, we should hand the kernel hackers a copy of the GNOME
release process. Asking vendors not to backport is conceivable if you
have regular releases. If you don’t have regular releases, then
there’s no way vendors can ever work on HEAD without backports –
because nobody can invest money to develop a feature that may not be
usable for an unknown number of years.

The “fragmentation” issue is totally bogus anyhow – backports aren’t
the same as dead-end patches that the mainline project rejected.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004-04.html#20.2)