"Ahoy me laddies (and beauties)," Linux creator Linus Torvalds began, announcing the seventh release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, "time for the traditional 'Talk Like a Pirate Day' kernel release!" He noted, "now, last year we had a full release (2.6.18 was immortalized on TLAP-2006), but this year I'm chickening out, and we're just doing what is hopefully going to be the last -rc release for the 2.6.23 series." Full source changes can be viewed via the gitweb interface. Linus also offered a brief summary of the changes:
"I'm not including the diffstat, because it got blown up by the resurrection of the sk98lin driver - because skge that is supposed to supplant it doesn't handle some of the hardware. Oh well.
"Apart from that, we had some mips, powerpc and xtense updates, and various driver tweaks. Things like the USB autosuspend revert should make people happier, and some more clockevents fixes should help suspend/restore on i386."
Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.18 Linux kernel, following the previous stable kernel release by three months [story]. He exclaimed, "she's good to go, hoist anchor!", the second year in a row that a kernel release has coincided with 'Talk Like A Pirate Day' [story]. "Here's some real booty for all you land-lubbers," Linus continued, "there's not too many changes, with t'bulk of the patch bein' defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here email describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs." In keeping with the theme, he signed the announcement, "Linus 'but you can call me Cap'n'".
The latest kernel source can be downloaded from your nearest Linux Kernel archive mirror [story]. You can browse through all the changes using the gitweb interface, complete with a 2.6.18 tag playfully declaring, "Raise the Jolly Roger!".
Following the piratical release of 2.6.14-rc2, a brief discussion looked at the advantages of using git to grab the latest version of the kernel code. A small break in service as the master.kernel.org server was situated in its new home [story] caused the 2.6.14-rc2 patch to not show up right away, and led to people pointing out the advantages of using git. When the ketchup script [story] was proposed as an alternative, it was illustrated how git can keep you up to date with the kernel down to a patch by patch level, or with a specific checkpoint. Linus further explained how git can be used to first track down that a bug was introduced between for example rc1-git3 and rc1-git4, and then to use "git-bisect" to further isolate the problem to a specific change.
As for -rc2, Linus noted, "not a whole lot o' excitement, ye scurvy dogs, but it has t' ALSA, LSM, audit and watchdog merges that be missed from -rc1, and a merge series with Andrew. But on t' whole pretty reasonable - you can see t' details in the shortlog (appended)." Evidently Monday the 19'th of September was International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
