Latin-quoting Linus Torvalds plays God by not abusing mortals

Makes 4.7rc2 change after merge window because he's Linus, and by Jupiter he can

Linus Torvalds has loosed release candidate 2 of version 4.7 of the Linux kernel on the waiting world.

"Things are looking fairly normal, and there are fixes all over, with drivers and architecture code leading the charge as usual, but there's stuff spread out all over the place, including filesystems, networking, mm, library helpers, etc etc," Torvalds wrote .

The Linux Lord warns "There's still a known nfs regression pending, but nobody outside of some explicit stress-testing seems to have noticed, so I made a rc2 release despite knowing of the problem."

He's promised a fix before rc3.

Torvalds has also added “a late non-fix I took even though the merge window is over, because I've been wanting it for a while.”

He justifies the change by using the Latin phrase Quod licet Iovi, which translates as “What is permissible for Jove is not permissible for an ox.”

“I doubt anybody notices the actual effects of a pty change/cleanup that means that our old disgusting DEVPTS_MULTIPLE_INSTANCES kernel config option is gone, because the cleanup means that it is no longer needed,” Torvalds says in his explanation for the change.:

“We used to have the situation that certain distributions wanted that config option disabled for legacy reasons, and others needed it enabled for modern behavior. Our /dev/ptmx behavior has been cleaned up and fixed so that it JustWorks(tm) in both cases, and that nasty wart is just gone. Plus the code is nicer anyway.”

“I mention that non-fix probably mainly because I feel a bit guilty about taking it, since I would probably have shouted at some submaintainer that tried to call that cleanup a late fix.”

And then comes the Latin.

We presume Torvalds is Jove and other contributors to the kernel are the oxen. Which many sound demeaning but is very mild compared to some of the stuff Torvalds has dished out over the years. ®