Linux 6.17-rc5 release is on track, but Torvalds calls out community on wasteful habits

On Sunday, Linus Torvalds, head of the Linux kernel project, announced the fifth release candidate of Linux 6.17-rc5. He said that development is proceeding normally with a “sane” diffstat and commit counts. This week’s changes primarily consist of small patches, but there was a single, larger patch, a reverted DLink/Sundance driver, which Torvalds called an “oddity”.

This week’s message from Torvalds is quite a bit longer than usual as he took the time to air a long-standing frustration with “useless ‘Link:’ entries” in commit messages. He criticized the practice, especially when these links point back to the original submission email, for wasting people’s time whenever digging for context. Torvalds said he has been complaining for years about this issue and says that links aren’t useful for debugging or tracking bugs, contrary to popular belief.

So that he doesn’t have to wade through links that provide no new information, Torvalds has asked contributors not to use tooling mindlessly. If developers want to include links, they should only be added if they are genuinely useful, such as pointing to bug reports or discussions that provide context.

As the fifth release candidate, we are getting quite close to the end of the Linux 6.17 release cycle. As Torvalds is complaining about pet peeves and not actual issues in the kernel, this is positive because it means the stable build may arrive after the seventh release candidate instead of an eighth RC. If nothing goes wrong between then and now, we can expect the new kernel on September 28.

So far, all of the release candidates have been pretty stable. The fact that much of the development took place in August, when developers are more likely to be on holiday, could be a reason for the stability, as fewer contributions are being made. While this seems like a positive now, it could mean more issues will crop up late in the cycle and delay the release.