Subject: Linux 0.99.15 released: Codefreeze for 1.0
From: [email-masked] (Linus Torvalds)
Date: 4 Feb 1994 22:31:37 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce

[ Moderator's note: [email-masked] (Christopher Shaulis) reports (long
  before Linus actually gets this announcement written :-) that he
  will have this version up for ftp at netcom.nom in /pub/cjs until the
  end of the month.  It will of course migrate to other sites as well.
  --liw ]

People who look into my directory on ftp.funet.fi will already have
noticed that the latest version of linux (0.99.15) is available, and I
assume it will be available on most other linux sites soon.  As
explained in a previous announcement, 0.99.15 is "it", in that this will
be the base for 1.0 after about a month of testing.  No further patches
are accepted until the 1.0 release, unless they obviously fix a serious
bug. 

**** NOTE 1 ****

  For this code-freeze to be effective yet still potential bugs be
  found, testing is needed, along with good reports of errors and
  problems.  Thus, nobody should think "hey, the *real* release will be
  out in a month, let's wait for that", but instead think: "hey, I'd
  better test this one, so that the *real* release won't result in any
  ugly surprises for me". 

  In short: test it out, preferably even more than you usually do.  Run
  "crashme" for the whole month if you have the CPU-power to spare,
  and/or just misuse your machine as badly as you can.  And if there are
  problems, report them to me (and the better the report, the more
  likely I am to be able to do something about it). 

**** NOTE 2 ****

  Bumping the linux version number to 1.0 doesn't mean anything more
  than that: it's only a version number change.  More explicitly, it
  does *NOT* mean that linux will become commercial (the copyright will
  remain as-is), nor does it mean that development stops here, and that
  1.0 will be anything special in that respect. 

  I'm also afraid that just changing the version number will not make
  potential bugs magically disappear: this has been amply proven by
  various software houses over the years.  This code-freeze is there in
  order to avoid most of the problems that people sometimes associate
  with "X.0 releases", and I hope that it will mean that we have a
  reasonably stable release that we can call 1.0 and one that I won't
  have to be ashamed of. 

Ok, enough said, I hope.  The pl15 release is hopefully good, but I'll
continue to make ALPHA patches against it along the whole month as
problems crop up.  The networking code has been much maligned, and is
not perfect by far yet, but it's getting its act together thanks to
various developers and testers.  And as wiser men than I have said (or
if they haven't, they should have):

	"There is life after 1.0"

Any rumors that the world is coming to an end just because I'm about to
release a 1.0-version are greatly exaggerated.  I think. 

			Linus
----------
Things that remained the same between 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:

 - I again forgot to update the README before uploading the release.  In
   pl14, I talked about pl13, while the all new and improved README has
   now caught up with pl14.  Remind me to buy a new brain one of these
   days. 

Changes between versions 0.99.14 and 0.99.15:

 - improved Pentium detection.  Some of you may have had linux report
   your 4086DX2 as a pentium machine, but the new kernel will tell you
   the sad truth.  Whee.
 - Network driver updates by Donald Becker.  New drivers added, old ones
   updated. 
 - FPU emulation updates by Bill Metzenthen.  Various minor errors and
   misfeatures fixed (mostly error handling). 
 - Support for the SoubdBlaster Pro CD-ROM driver added by Eberhard
   Moenkeberg. 
 - extended support for keyboard re-definition, along with font
   re-programming (Eugene Crosser, Andries Brouwer et al). 
 - tty handling fixes: true canonical mode with most features supported
   by Julian Cowley.  This may make your canonical mode behave funnily
   if you happen to use old and broken programs that happened to work
   with the old and broken behaviour (this includes at least some
   'getty' programs). 
 - serial driver changes and tty fixes by Theodore Ts'o.
 - SCSI fixes by Drew Eckhardt, Eric Youngdale, Rik Faith, Kai Mdkisara
   et al. 
 - Updated sound card driver to version 2.4 (Hannu Savolainen)
 - COFF binary loading support (but you will still need the experimental
   iBCS2 patches to run non-linux i386 COFF binaries) by Al Longyear.
 - Upgraded ext2fs filesystem routines (0.4a -> 0.4b), with new
   features.  Read the fs/ext2/CHANGES file for details.  Remy Card and
   Stephen Tweedie.  Get a new fsck that knows about the new features. 
 - pipe behaviour fixed in the presense of multiple writers (now
   actually conforms to POSIX specs about atomic writes).  Much of the
   code by Florian Coosmann. 
 - minix filesystem extended to support the clean flag: get a new fsck
   that knows about it.
 - System V filesystem (support for Xenix, Coherent and SysV
   filesystems) by Doug Evans, Paul Monday, Pascal Haible and Bruno
   Haible. 
 - loadable modules (various authors, don't remember original author of
   the "modules" code). 
 - Lots of networking fixes by various people: Alan Cox, Charles
   Hedrick, me and various other people.  Non-byte-aligned networks
   work, and the networking code should be much stabler in general. 

 + various bugfixes and enhacements here and there (mcd driver update by
   Jon Tombs, atixlmouse fix by Chris Colohan, /dev/full by XXX etc etc)

All in all, the patches come out to 1.5MB uncompressed (about 400kB
gzip-9'd), so there is little or no idea to make patches to plain pl14
available.  Incremental patches and ALPHA-releases can be found on
ftp.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus/ALPHA-pl14.

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