Hans,
my understanding is that core changes that aren't in by Halloween are
not going to be accepted until 2.7. By pre-announcing the deadline,
it is hoped that people will have lots of time to submit things that are
ready for inclusion, as opposed to rushing to submit when the "freeze"
is announced all of a sudden.
If (as we all hope) the important features are added incrementally to
the development kernel over the next few months, maybe all of the usage
and testing that is going into the development kernel will not be
totally lost when the entire kernel is morphed under a huge weight of
patches.
It may even mean that there will not be an extra year of features (and
bugs) being added to the "frozen" kernel, and we will be able to start
2.7 earlier.
As always, I imagine that as long as you have any core changes in 2.5
before the freeze, it will not be impossible to add self-contained
things like filesystems and drivers after the freeze also.
Cheers, Andreas
-- Andreas Dilger http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/