In a couple of year, we’ll be treated to Linux 4.0. It’s creator, Linus Torvalds, desires to know if it will focus exclusively on bug fixes and stability.

PCWorld reports that Torvalds made the controversial suggestion during a Q&A session at LinuxCon Europe in October. He was asked by Intel’s Linux chief Dirk Honhdel if he thought the Linux development community should focus entirely on bug fixes in an upcoming release.

In a blog post posted a couple of days ago, Torvalds revisits that query:

“we’re attending to release numbers where i need to take off my socks to count that top again. I’m comfortable with 3 , but I don’t want us to get to the types of crazy numbers we had within the 2.x series, so in some unspecified time in the future we’re going to chop over from 3.x to 4.x, simply to keep the numbers small and simple to bear in mind. We’re not there yet, but i might actually like to not go into the twenties, so i’m able to see it happening in a year or so, and we’ll have 4.0 follow 3.19 or something like that.

Now, it’s only a number (since we’ve long since given up on feature-related releases), and it’s a minimum of a year away, so why do I even mention it in any respect?

The reason I mention this is because I’ve been mulling over something Dirk Hohndel said during LinuxCon EU and the kernel summit. He asked on the Q&A session whether shall we do a release with just stability and insect-fixes, and that i pooh-poohed it because I didn’t see most folks having the awareness span required for that (cough*cough*moronic*woodland creature*cough*cough).

So i’ll be pessimistic, but I’d expect many developers would go “Let’s hunt bugs.. Wait. Oooh, shiny” and burst off doing a little new feature in spite of everything instead. Or simply take that release off.

But I do wonder.. Maybe it might be possible, and I’m just unfairly projecting my very own inner squirrel onto other kernel developers. If we’ve got enough heads-up that folks *know* that for one release (and corporations/managers know that too) the sole patches that get accepted are the sort that fix bugs, maybe people really would have sufficient attention span that it might work.

And the explanation I mention “4.0″ is that it’d be a good looking time to do this. Roughly a years heads-up that “ok, after 3.19 (or whatever), we’re doing a release with *just* fixes, after which that becomes 4.0″.”

A Linux release solely devoted to bug fixes sounds awesome, and that i think many developers would agree. What some developers won’t trust is the suggestion that version 4.0 be the version that’s solely devoted to bug fixes. Moving as much as a brand new version number typically means that there’s been some major additions to the software, and the construction community may option to reserve that number for whatever new features they’re currently cooking up.

Torvalds is good, however, when he says that 4.0 is simply more than a few. A 4.0 release that’s solely devoted to bug fixes would mean just up to a three.19 release solely devoted to adding new features. It’s all in regards to the development community with Linux though and they’re going to make the general call.

What do you suspect? Should Linux 4.0 be reserved for some major feature release, or should it follow Torvalds’ advice and focus solely on bug fixes? Would the Linux development community also be capable of dedicate itself entirely to squashing bugs?

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