Torvalds Reveals Future Plans
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has announced what he would like to do with the Linux development in the next several decades.
In other words, we’d have an increasing level of instability with an odd release number, depending on how long-term the instability is.
- 2.6.<even>: even at all levels, aim for having had minimally intrusive patches leading up to it (timeframe: a week or two)
with the odd numbers going like:
- 2.6.<odd>: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two).
- 2.<odd>.x: aim for big changes that may destabilize the kernel for several releases (timeframe: a year or two)
- <odd>.x.x: Linus went crazy, broke absolutely _everything_, and rewrote the kernel to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic. (timeframe: "we expect that he will be released from the mental institution in a decade or two").