14 DAY TRIAL // Linux kernel 3.7 RC8 was announced yesterday and Linus Torvalds has taken the opportunity to scold the kernel developers for prolonging the release of the 3.7 branch with minor problems.
One of the main reasons the eighth Release Candidate was released for the 3.7 branch was because of a kswapd issue. This problem has pushed the release window close to Christmas, which in turn means more work for the maintainers close to the holiday.
“Is not very nice timing-wise, since that means that the next merge window will run up very close to christmas, but hey, maybe that will at least convince people to not leave things to the final days of the merge window, and send me pull requests *early*. That would be nice,” stated Torvalds in the official announcement.
He then proceeded to explain that unless the world ends by the end of December or if there is an actual problem reported by users, he will not acknowledge any more pull requests that can wait for the 3.8 release.
“And because I'm dragging it out for another week, I'm going to be *very* bitter if anybody sends me pull requests this late in the game that aren't for major issues. If you send me small irrelevant stuff that doesn't fix major issues (oopses, security, things like that), I'm going to curse at you and ignore your pull request. So don't do it,” continued Torvalds.
The number of fixes and updates in this latest Release Candidate, which will also be the last if we survive the Apocalypse, is not impressive.
A complete list of changes and fixes can be found in the official mailing list. Users of the Linux kernel 3.7.x branch are urged to update as soon as possible to the new version.
Download Linux kernel 3.7 RC8 right now from Softpedia.