On Tue, 2016-09-06 at 01:35 +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 05, 2016 at 05:22:59PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Monday 05 Sep 2016 10:03:27 Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > > This is why upstream-first is so darned important.  And why 
> > > sloppy patches that break other architectures are a really bad 
> > > idea, even if they are for a vendor-only BSP kernel....
> 
> You're preaching to the converted here but just telling everyone over
> and over again that they're doing a terrible job isn't helping 
> anything. It's not offering any sort of constructive suggestion for 
> how to improve the situation that engages with the reality on the
> ground.

OK, so how do we move forwards?  Everyone who remembers the 2.4->2.6
transition is convinced of upstream first because it was impossible to
forward port the patch sets.

However, with the 2.6 release methodology, you have much smaller patch
sets and we have a much more incremental release strategy, meaning you
don't have this massive (2 year) gap between upports.  I think it's
arguable that our change in release strategy coupled with you getting
enough stuff upstream supports vendors who want to target a stable tree
because the patch difference is big but not that huge to upport.

So there's probably a couple of things we could do about this

   1. Nothing.  Say it's working about as well as can be expected for
      embedded and stop worrying.
   2. Accept that the pain will never be great enough and approach from a
      process view point instead.  Perhaps changing the acceptance
      criteria for the base tree to make it harder to get features in
      making it less painful to get them upstream and then backported?
   3. Increase the pain.  Not sure I like this, but in theory, we could
      churn the upstream API to increase the pain of upports, but it would
      also cause a lot of issues with backports.

James