[$] The imminent stable-version apocalypse

As has often been pointed out, the stable-kernel releases are meant to bestable; that means they should be even more averse to ABI breaks thanmainline releases, if that is possible. This may be a hard promise to keepfor the next set of stable kernels, though, for the most mundane ofreasons: nobody thought that there would be more than 255 minor updates toany given kernel release.