Updates to Zen Release Cycle

Greetings everyone!  With the month of leap years just around the corner, Zen has also taken its own leap to the future by taking a stab at modern release philosophies;  the art of rolling code.

I read an article on slashdot.org about the last version of HTML 5.  Of course, that's just a play on words and we're always going to be progressing forward with new HTML standards.  But the way that HTML will be developed requires two parts to the puzzle.  The standards development from WHATWG will continue and they'll organically improve HTML as demand needs them to and the W3C will essentially "tag" certain versions of their standards document with a number.  Basically, WHATWG can do what they do best and improve HTML while the W3C determines when the HTML standard is good and significantly different enough to release that as the next version of HTML for web browsers and web developers to standardize against.

If you take the skeleton of this whole methodology and place it on top of Zen's current reality, there isn't much different.  We still have packagers who take snapshots of Zen that they use and build a kernel for their users.  The users that build kernels purely for self interest grab the newest code and avoid the tags.  Then there's the small minority who do use the Zen tag, probably because they don't know any better (sorry guys).

I hope that making these changes will also close an important feedback loop that I feel is missing.  When everyone is encouraged to run the newest version, there are less opportunities for bugs to creep in from features and patches that don't exactly behave the way the author of the new code intended them to.  This also gives kernel developers opportunities to test their patches that improve the behavior of the Linux kernel (things I'm sure all Zen users are all happy about) on a wider audience. 

If you need more evidence of this new process working in the longterm, watch a lecture from Theo de Raadt and his success story on his release process that is currently used in OpenBSD: youtube.com.  The only difference with Zen is the lack of a version every 6 months since we strictly depend on the next version of the Linux kernel.

Remember, if you do not want to clone the Zen repository, you can always download the daily snapshots that patch directly against Linus's vanilla kernel here: downloads.zen-kernel.org.