So in a very real way, a release is just a starting point for further work, but very little of that "further work" is actually things I have anything to do with what-so-ever or much interest in. Yes, I see the patches that are queued up for the stable kernels, but mostly as an observer. And the distributions do their own thing. So what makes a release anti-climactic is that from a development standpoint - at least as far as I'm concerned - it is inevitably at the end of a gradual slowing down of interest. So to me a release is not so much of a birth of a new kernel version, it's more of a laying-to-rest of an old one. It's also an end to a fairly quiet period.So I tagged the release five hours ago, and during the few days before that I had barely a score of commits to merge. But now that I have cut the release, my mailbox is starting to come alive with merge requests for the next version - with thousands of commits queuing up for merging in just a few hours, as opposed to the slow trickle in the days that went before. This is all exactly as it should be, of course, but it still feels bass-ackwards, in that people always talk about the death-march to a release, and how you're supposed to take a well-deserved vacation after the release.
