Linus Torvalds pines for header file fix but releases Linux 5.8 anyway

Emotional, Burning, Unlimited Tuned Laboratory

Lots of love for AMD and POWER 10 and a hint of some Google’s operational code making it into future releases

The meta-maintainer last week pondered an eighth release candidate for Linux 5.8, but on Sunday decided “it’s not just worth waiting another week when there aren’t any big looming worries around.”

Torvalds did encounter “annoying noise with header file dependencies this week” and thought out loud about whether it might be time to sort that out, as follows:

“It did reinforce how nice it would be if we had some kind of tooling support to break nasty header file dependencies automatically, but if wishes were horses. Maybe some day we’ll have some kind of SAT-solver for symbol dependencies that can handle all our different architectures and configurations, but right now it’s just a manual pain that occasionally bites us.”