File under no big surprise: Linux kernel ‘getting buggier’

I saw this article this morning:Linux kernel ‘getting buggier,’ leader says | CNET News.com, and I have to say that I’m not surprised.

Its not that Linux is buggy by default, rather that it has grown so much that this was bound to happen. I think that anytime you have a project with multiple developers over a long period of time, and a growing user base you are just bound to get (or find) more bugs.

The statement by Andrew Morton about the difficulty of getting coders to look at old bugs is very true. I experienced that myself here recently. Its hard to go back and re-visit something that once was working (or so you thought) but is now broken in some weird convoluted way.

I wonder if anyone is running any type of code analysis tools over the kernel codebase. I’m sure someone is, its just too high profile of a project for someone to not do that. I imagine that report must be a mile and a half long…