A stat and a confirmation

Buried in this news piece about the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, organized by the Linux Foundation, which featured discussions about the Linux support for embedded systems, power-saving, those patent deals, real-time Linux and so on and so forth, is the kind of nuggety technical stat that tickles my nerdy sensibilities, and I just know I'm going to be using it a party sometime soon:

Starting with release 2.4 and then 2.6 of the Linux kernel,Linus Torvalds and company have been issuing updates every two to three months. "We add 2,000 lines of code a day to the Linux kernel. We work on 2,800 lines of code a day," said kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman. "I've never seen the pace of change that Linux has shown."

While that "work on" line is a little vague, this passage is followed by some rumination on the kind of testing that happens on the kernel (not enough regression testing), and the way in which the structure of the Linux development model relies on its user base:

There's a tension between introducing new features and stabilizing them...what we really need is for the user community to help us track down bugs...The user base is far bigger than the number of kernel developers