From a post on Ian McDonald’s Blog:
Is it me or is it crazy the pace of point releases at the moment? Do we really need four kernels in three days?
Actually it’s just you, and perhaps a few others, who for some reason still don’t see any point in the 2.6.x.y release of kernels.
We haven’t had 4 new kernels in 3 days. We’ve had 4 small patchsets covering regressions and security flaws. In each case, the patches are less than 100 lines of code, and are considered “simple”. The fact that there are 4 of them represents the high level of effort the stable tree maintainer, and people submitting patches, is putting into the kernel.
I’d much rather have 4 security releases in 3 days, then be told to wait until the next stable kernel. Or have to track down and find the patch myself, only to discover that it doesn’t apply cleanly. I’m capable of doing these things, but there are plenty of people who aren’t, and the 2.6.x.y stable series provides a great infrastructure for the announcement and dissemination of timely security and regression patches.
At the end of the day, the chances are fairly good you’ll never need any of the patches in the stable series. What’s more, the 2.6.x.y patches all get rolled into 2.6.x+1 anyway, so you’ll get them all then. So feel free to ignore these “crazy” “kernel releases”