From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2016 08:00:55 -0400 From: Theodore Ts'o To: Tsugikazu Shibata Message-ID: <20160910120055.gr2cvad7efwci4f2@thunk.org> References: <57C78BE9.30009@linaro.org> <20160902134711.movdpffcdcsx6kzv@thunk.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Cc: "ltsi-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org" , Greg KH , "ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org" , Mark Brown Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [LTSI-dev] [Stable kernel] feature backporting collaboration List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Tue, Sep 06, 2016 at 07:20:37AM +0000, Tsugikazu Shibata wrote: > > Finally, A request to the community from LTSI's stand point is: > We want to have some process to be expected; How or about when > LTS would be released. So that companies can easier to create their plan > to use LTS and that will cause more user can use stable and secure > kernel. LTS is released in the Fall. This year Greg K-H announced that the next LTS would be 4.9 a month or so ago. He said a week or two ago that he reserved the right to not pick 4.9 and either fall back to 4.8 or wait until 4.10 if people abused the preannouncement (e.g., by trying to squish into Linus's tree a lot of patches that were extremely buggy and not ready for prime time). Historically this has been a problem when the enterprise distributions were extremely strict about the "upstream first" policy, and so vendors who wanted specific features would try cram stuff into the LTS kernel before they were ready, resulting in an *extremely* unstable LTS candidate. I'm going to guess that since upstream first is so loosely followed by the mobile handset community that this is going to be much less of an issue --- or the really abusive stuff (e.g., that spreads sh*t all over the core scheduler code changes which are extremely specific to a particular ARM SOC core, so badly that the schedule won't compile for any other architecture) would get rejected by Linus with extreme prejudice anyway. So the "about when" has been pretty easy to predict for quite a while now. And the process has also been roughly the same for a while; IIRC the announcement came at the kernel summit, again with the caveat that it might be subject to change if people abused the preannouncement. And even when it wasn't preannounced because of the historic abuse patterns, people who had observed past practices could generally guestimate the LTS candidate to within +/- a release. If that is not enough of a process, could you please state what you think would be more helpful? Thanks, - Ted