We have already said it many times. Linus Torvalds is a quiet man, to the point where nothing worries him. He always sees everything as normal, there is always something that explains what is happening in his core development, and there is always a calm solution. We say that he is optimistic, and this week he had to say it himself, because Linux 6.0-rc6 it is smaller in size than it should be and that could be a problem thinking about the release date of the stable version.
Putting on the "ridiculously optimistic hat," the father of Linux says that the small size of Linux 6.0-rc6 could mean that everything is so good and stable that not many fixes have been needed this week. Without that hat, the explanation would be different: he and many open source software developers were in Dublin, and that would mean that the work that should have been done was not done.
Linux 6.0 could arrive on October 9
So this is an artificially small -rc release, because this past week we had the Maintainer Summit in Dublin (along with OSS EU and LPC 2022), so we've had a lot of maintainers traveling.
Or - putting on my ridiculously optimistic hat - maybe things are so nice and stable that there just weren't that many fixes?
Yes, I know for what scenario I bet, but the hope it is eternal.
In any case, things seem to be fine. I'm expecting the rc7 to be bigger than usual because the pull requests have shifted to a week later, and in the worst case that could mean I might feel like we need an extra rc8, but for now I'm going to assume that it's not going to be _that_ noticeable and I hope we stay on the regular schedule.
How things are, something that we have also been discussing for at least five weeks. Everything seemed to be going perfectly, but a stone can always appear on the road, or a smaller one in the shoe, which ruins all plans. That seems to happen with the development of Linux 6.0: everything was going well, and everything is going well, but an event is held, the maintainers leave their posts, the work that should be done is not done… In the end it seems that there will be rc8 because there will be no time material, not because of problems. If in the end it is so, Linux 6.0 will arrive on October 9, on day 2 if everything returns to normal. Whichever date it arrives, Ubuntu users who want to install it will have to do so on their own, as 22.10 will use Linux 5.19.