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Comment by srisa | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who feels that the kernel releases have been more frequent during recent times? Or is it that they have changed the version numbering like firefox?

About an year or so ago, it was something like 2.6.x. Then, it jumped to 3.0 and now it is at 3.9.

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Kernel releases have been getting a bit more frequent. A couple of years ago they were about 80 days apart, now it's closer to 70. A change, but not a huge one.

Linux jumped from 2.6.39 to 3.0 because the numbers were getting too big. He also decided that as the middle digit wasn't being incremented, he'd drop it.

I really wish he would've gone with date-based version numbers. 3.X is eventually going to get "too big" and it will be the same (non-)problem.

I remember seeing 2.6.42 on my ubuntu 10.04. May be it was kind of an alias for some 3.x version.

Yeah, some software assumed that there must be three digits in version numbers so 3.X kernels were sometimes called 2.6.X+40 which means 2.6.42 actually is 3.2.

There's no unstable 2.7, it's mainly because of that. The change to 3.0 happened basically to signal that.

EDIT: For those who do not remember the 2.x stuff when x was a odd number the version was unstable, when it was an even number the version was stable and basically was what distributions used.

Agreed. It seems that the trajectory from 2.0 to 3.0 was much, much slower than the one from 3.0 to 4.0 (at least judging by data points so far).

Anyone know of any reason for this?

What kind of data points do you have for a trajectory to 4.0? There's no plan for a 4.0 kernel.

I think Linus said he's gonna switch to 4.* once the minor version number gets "too big" (probably 30-40 like he did on 2.6.*).

sorry, I just meant there's no schedule for 4.* for which you can gauge a "trajectory", just a plan to bump it after a few years.

Since 2004, the kernel team has aimed to release every 2-3 months, and current releases are still within that timeline.

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