Linus Torvalds' regular Sunday night missive on the state of kernel development has labelled version 4.2 as a bit of a problem child and warned he “might not react politely” to some developer requests.

Announcing the release of release candidate five (rv5), Torvalds says “it's looking like 4.2 might be one of the releases needing more than the usual seven rc releases.”

He goes on to say “things aren't calming down like I would wish, and we've still had some fairly annoying issues pop up.”

“None of this is particularly disastrous or nasty,” he adds, “and the issues are hard to hit and fairly small details, so it's not like I'm particularly worried. But it's just more than I wish was going on at this stage of the release.”

Torvalds is at pains to point out that the development process isn't off the rails in any way, but is just experiencing some hiccups. But he's also hinted that his temper is being tested by this version of the kernel, writing that “if you send me a pull request that I deem questionable, I might not react politely.”

In January 2015, Torvalds told a session at Linux.conf.au “I'm not a nice person and I don't care about you,” but that any outbursts are due to his passion for technology and not hatred of those on the receiving end of his rants. Those outbursts include a tirade against Red Hat, a dust-up with systemd developer Kay Sievers and a run-in with other kernel developers. ®