From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 23:19:03 -0400 From: Steven Rostedt To: "Rafael J. Wysocki" Message-ID: <20160726231903.50013567@grimm.local.home> In-Reply-To: <2340101.mYDzTnT1Lv@vostro.rjw.lan> References: <20160710170117.GI26097@thunk.org> <578293C5.1090503@roeck-us.net> <2340101.mYDzTnT1Lv@vostro.rjw.lan> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: James Bottomley , ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org, ksummit-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org, Jason Cooper Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable workflow List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:38:05 +0200 "Rafael J. Wysocki" wrote: > However, "long-term stable" trees started to appear at one point and those are > quite different and serve a different purpose. I'm not quite sure if handling > them in the same way as 4.6.y is really the best approach. At least it seems > to lead to some mismatch between the expectations and what is really delivered. I think what happens is simply time. For 4.6.y stable kernels, there's nothing but bug fixes to add to them. But when you talk about older kernels, there is a tendency to add stuff that could be questionable about how much of a "fix" something is. Not to mention, the older a kernel is, the more it diverges from mainline, and there may be fixes in mainline, that are "sorta" fixes for those kernels. I've had fixes that fixed a bug that mutated over time. In older kernels, it was still a bug, but perhaps not as critical. In the newer kernels, the bug made a bigger impact. Sometimes it was simply that the newer kernel was much more likely to trigger the race condition. How far back to have a fix go becomes a gray area. Perhaps the fix for 4.6.y is obviously correct, but that same fix may not be so obvious for older kernels. -- Steve