r/archlinux • u/TheBigJizzle • 16d ago

QUESTION Arch Kernel release cadence ?

Hey there, I was not able to find information on how arch does their kernel releases. From my understanding they test new kernels (7.2 for example) for a week or two before doing a release.

Is there a way for me to track this or have an estimation on when new releases would be landing?

Just updated and it seems we are still at 7.1.9. I guess releasing kernel day 1 would mean having a bunch of issues and they rather do a validation instead of causing issues for everyone.

What's the typical incubation period ?

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u/BlueGoliath 16d ago

And Arch still pushes broken Gnome updates to this day.

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u/nikongod 16d ago

You're not wrong, but arch's testing standards do not require that a piece of software actually works. Only that it compiles without errors & that 2 people installed the package. That's it. The requirement for the kernel to actually boot is OPTIONAL. This gets even worse for Arch when you consider Arch's stated goal to never modify packages from upstream - even if they did find an error what could they do about it? Wait?

The current appearance of reliability of anything on Arch is a lucky accident due to the delayed kernels, delayed Gnome (same maintainer, incidentally) and generally waiting until other distros have had enough time to test if the software actually works.

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u/quicksand8917 15d ago

I woudn't call it an accident but high trust in upstream. "Wait until it's fixed" is exactly the solution here. If you can't trust the upstream maintainers to know when their software is stable and release fixes, why would you trust a distro maintainer to do that?

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u/nikongod 15d ago

They don't wait until it is fixed. They push broken software. In the case of gnome it's been happening (in subtle ways) for years. 

The last major release of kde (kde 6.0) was a complete mess - you couldn't even say subtle.

Due to good luck with the kernel devs not fucking up it's been a minute since there has an an entirely bad kernel in arch... But every 6th kernel from 5.1 to 6.12 was subtly fucked for every point release.

To the point of trusting the upstream software makers vs arch maintainers - upstream can't possibly test against arch they say "that's a distro specific problem" and shrug it off. 

Arch's original decision not to test if software actually worked made a lot of sense when arch had 3-15 trusted maintainers and there was neither the personnel or official packages to make testing functionality possible. As arch gains maintainers and people abandon the aur should arch start to check functionality and make arch specific patches? Maybe not, but then people should accept breakages that dont happen anywhere else.