Early? If anything, it's pretty late (2.0.0 was a long time ago), and
we're already up to 2.1.71. Many kernel internals have changed,
especially the VFS (dcache), and it's going to take some work to get
the lowlevel stuff fixed, especially for filesystems like nfs, smbfs
and autofs. If we want a 2.2 in early 1998 it is time to focus on
that stuff. Hence, 2.2 will have a (hopefully cleaned-up) version of
autofs v3, and I have suspended all work on autofs v4 (another reason
is that I would like libc 6 to be better distributed before releasing
autofs v4 -- it will most likely not support libc 5 at all.)
The cleft between 2.0 and 2.1 has grown to the point where it is
impeding Linux development, especially since people keep clamoring for
their favourite features to get backported to 2.0.
-hpa
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