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The next version of Linux suffered a major setback in mid-August with the sudden announcement that the head IDE developer, Marcin Dalecki, was leaving the development effort and that all his IDE code was being thrown out.
Theres still mystery around the reasons for this, although Dalecki had been under steady criticism by some other kernel developers frustrated at IDE features being summarily removed or their file systems getting corrupted because of IDE code development breakage. The Linux kernel mailing list is a harsh and unforgiving forum.
The real surprise was that Linus Torvalds threw away all the IDE development that Dalecki had done (115 patches during six months) and reverted the Linux 2.5 kernel to the IDE code in the current shipping Linux 2.4 version.
The IDE effort is being resurrected, starting with the current 2.4 code base, which is largely managed by kernel developer Alan Cox. Whatever the result, IDE improvements will now not be high on the list of major enhancements coming in Linux 2.6.