NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver
changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is
just about renumbering, we are very much not doing a KDE-4 or a
Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at
all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years
now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the
renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ("20 years")
instead.”
I've noticed the same. Most of my posts that have been massively upvoted were suggestions or small corrections. The posts in which I take time to explain something non-trivial generally end up with 2-3 votes at most.
Amount of karma is not a measure of interestingness of the contribution, it's used mainly as an 'agree' button.
This is almost certainly caused by the decision to hide comment score. If people could see that this kind of comment (f.ex. a small correction) already had its fair share of upvotes they would leave it at that, but as it is now everybody who sees it upvotes it.
1. If, now or in the future, the HN comment-ordering algorithm pays attention to children's scores, then you get the following pathology: A says something slightly wrong, B makes a small correction, B's comment gets massively upvoted because everyone upvotes it, so that subthread gets treated as highly-scored even though there's nothing terribly insightful or interesting about it. (You could, but probably wouldn't, get the following even worse follow-on pathology: people start putting mistakes into their comments so that this will happen and they'll get extra visibility.)
2. People get more karma for posting minor corrections than for posting substantive comments. That's arguably unfair, and again it has a possible follow-on pathology: making nitpicking more popular and carefully thought-out insightful comments less popular.
I've noticed no such change in my own comment scores with or without scores displayed. I think it's a problem intrinsic to comment voting systems. I see the same problem at all such websites I've frequented.
You've provided a valuable service and saved people time. The first question anyone will have about Kernel 3.0 is "What's new/different in it from 2.6.39?". By summarizing/quoting you let people skip skimming the article, or a Google search, and saved them time.
It would break many of the programs which rely on 2.6.x naming scheme. Linus always was on the side of not breaking things if they do work. It seems that he changed his views for this particular case.
I don't know if that's fair. I mean, if you have a program that needs to parse out the Linux kernel version then you could very plausibly have assumed the format vX.X.X[-something|.X], given it's been that way consistently for 15 years (since 2.1.0 in '96). Even the kernel's own scripts do that, as Linus mentions in the email. Now it's going to have format vX.X for the first time since 2.0.
I can't actually think of the use case for needing to parse the complete version string outside the kernel, but it doesn't sound stupid to me that you'd assume a canonical format that's been there for a decade and a half. Apparently wrong, and decidedly unimportant & bikesheddy, but not necessarily stupid.
Ultimately, you get the worst you're willing to put up with. When the Windows dev team bends over backwards to keep buggy applications working, they signal that those bugs are acceptable and turn them into the accepted way to develop Windows application software.
When Torvalds bumps the major version number with little warning, he signals that anything which depends on it always being '2.x.x' or, worse, '2.6.x', is not acceptable and will not be tolerated.
I've lived in both worlds. I prefer Linux. I'm not alone.
“So what are the big changes?
NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is just about renumbering, we are very much not doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ("20 years") instead.”
by Linus Torvalds
source: ttp://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1147415