Minor versions go up according to a certain pattern based on how the change mgmt is handled for the kernel, but major releases are marked when the kernel team “feels it’s the right time”.
To kernel developers, version numbers continued to have no meaning other than as a measure of where things were on the timeline, he said; users were encouraged to run the latest version. But if you tell customers they need to move from 3.20 to 4.0, they will consider it a multi-year effort that requires planning and paperwork; “so they will only do it when they have time, which is never”. Going from 3.20 to 4.0 seems like a big jump, and 4.0 to 4.2 seems much smaller, even though the latter brings roughly double the number of changes.
Maybe in the past, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment.
Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are essentially meaningless.
“We haven’t done releases based on features (or on “stable vs unstable”) for a long, long time now. So that new major number does not mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we’re somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It’s the usual “solid progress” marker, nothing more.”
Minor versions go up according to a certain pattern based on how the change mgmt is handled for the kernel, but major releases are marked when the kernel team “feels it’s the right time”.
From lwn: https://lwn.net/Articles/871989/
Maybe in the past, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment.
Thanks for this, I think I now understand what others are sating about this.