You know, some might feel that Linus is just being mean with the Linux coders. Looking at it more closely however and I believe I can understand the need for some kind of order to be put into place here.

The kernel development team recently set a policy that new features must be added to the next version of the kernel during the two weeks after the release of the previous version.

But James Bottomley, who currently maintains the code for SCSI support in the kernel, said Wednesday that he is finding it difficult to keep to the two-week merge window as contributors are leaving it to him to test whether their patches work with the rest of the system.

“That’s a nice theory, except that it’s my contributors who drop me in it by leaving their patch sets until you declare a kernel, dumping the integration testing on me in whatever time window is left,” Bottomley wrote in a posting to the kernel mailing list.

Torvalds replied that Bottomley needs to get tough on his contributors. [Read the rest]