[Ksummit-discuss] Self nomination - Sasha Levin

["Levin, Alexander" <alexander.levin@verizon.com>]

Hi all,

Appologies for the late mail - betweem workplace change (and ML mails bouncing off the old @oracle.com mail), and some personal stuff, I've missed the fact that planning and discussions have already started!

I wanted to discuss a variety of topics regarding stable kernels, testing, and testing stable kernels:

 - My new employer is a heavy user of "cutting edge" stable kernels, and as such I'm looking into ways to improve the process. Making people complain and express their unhappiness with concrete workflows is a good way for me to make improvements on my end.

 - Automating the while -stable process further: it's too dependant on humans getting things right which is a recipe for disaster. I have a few proposals about how to reduce the human aspect of it further to improve the quality of the resulting trees (expanding stable-tools even further!).

 - We need to figure out ways to integrate tests better, beyond the usual 3 day review window we have for "testing" where no *actual* user tests anything. In the example of Verizon, it simply doesn't fit in the workflow and we'd need to make a good amount of modifications to make it happen, so I bet it's the same issue for other users of the tree.

 - Reviewing the stable rules and adjusting them to reality. There's a mismatch between what the rules say and what actually happens.

 - A few smaller ideas I want to bounce off maintainers:

   - Adding stable@ tags to commits is "complicated", it requires editing the commit message which is an extra step that people are too lazy to take, how can we improve that?

   - Making checkpatch check for (some) of the stable kernel rules (and possibly recommend adding the stable@ tag in certain cases?).
     - Depends on: making checkpatch sane again.

   - Improving tagging for stable. The "version tag" option is broken and the "Fixes:" tag is always preferable, how do we get people to use that more often? (script it somehow? scripts/find-version-it-fixes ?).

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Thanks,
Sasha