From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from smtp.kernel.org (aws-us-west-2-korg-mail-1.web.codeaurora.org [10.30.226.201]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by smtp.subspace.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id B1D9F9474 for ; Sun, 14 Jul 2024 23:29:12 +0000 (UTC) Authentication-Results: smtp.subspace.kernel.org; arc=none smtp.client-ip=10.30.226.201 ARC-Seal:i=1; a=rsa-sha256; d=subspace.kernel.org; s=arc-20240116; t=1720999752; cv=none; b=ggwbyT6lVi5lGrNRG3258PBwXYF1BW9PFVG1dXsUIB8zPfVXoU/sSrCpMkD96Zu6Z2cVULgVHQK8Up8tQP7L2+acIyO/ZAaYsYXhepEpFpZoctWHno39qBn06O2CreboGfX9ye2V8RjPKTrXTmXyGKqZc53fp7vaidh5kl33bzk= ARC-Message-Signature:i=1; a=rsa-sha256; d=subspace.kernel.org; s=arc-20240116; t=1720999752; c=relaxed/simple; bh=PNYMlekDc75BeFUldBmFPdjFpBNutJTtwN/+FIni2G0=; h=Date:From:To:Cc:Subject:Message-ID:In-Reply-To:References: MIME-Version:Content-Type; b=iwJAEnpGp2mJTi7tarcPrxn3ECXwGkEOp+GH/6tgy7jCYgdheRHMc3ARoePSff62AIVe9C0rUt1IPqHlf7KjJ+zX7FoTgsXP5qeZckbtTi+It6c4G+oJWHgVIGuIc31lsYRHrM4zJm+WtgZ/tWj0ehrAMwTPVw8OzUxsT+zGhlU= ARC-Authentication-Results:i=1; smtp.subspace.kernel.org; arc=none smtp.client-ip=10.30.226.201 Received: by smtp.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 9DBC4C116B1; Sun, 14 Jul 2024 23:29:11 +0000 (UTC) Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2024 19:29:14 -0400 From: Steven Rostedt To: Sasha Levin Cc: Linus Torvalds , ksummit@lists.linux.dev, Greg KH Subject: Re: Proposal: Enhancing Commit Tagging for Stable Kernel Branches Message-ID: <20240714192914.1e1d3448@gandalf.local.home> In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.20.0git84 (GTK+ 2.24.33; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: ksummit@lists.linux.dev List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:27:30 -0400 Sasha Levin wrote: > If you think that anything with a Fixes tag should land in stable, then > great, we can change the formal policy and get it over with. I guess it comes down to what exactly do we consider a fix worthy of stable? Most of my commits I tag with Fixes have Cc stable too. But there's some cases where I made an improvement in logic, or restructured something that helps with performance and tag that with a Fixes. So, in these cases when I add "Fixes" without a Cc stable, it does mean "improvement" more than fix. Or I think the code change may be too risky to consider stable (as it may introduce a bug, as the code change is too big). Basically, it comes down to that I add Cc stable for anything I think is worthy to send to Linus in an -rc release. Perhaps all commits that go to Linus during -rc must have a Fixes tag, and Cc stable if the fixed commit happened in a previous kernel version? As Linus has been pointing out that he only wants fixes after -rc1. Sometimes I find a behavior bug, that's been there since the code was written. Like a new feature that works "some of the time", but then I find a corner case that doesn't work. I'll add Fixes but not "stable" when I fix the corner case. As Linus once criticized one of these types of fixes as it's not a fix. But I still label it a fix for those that want the feature to work in all cases. Recently this happened with an update to the user events. We found a case that doesn't work as expected, and I sent the "fix" to Linus in the -rc release, but Linus refused it. That was because it was more of an extension of an existing feature. That is, it wasn't a regression. The behavior never worked that way in previous kernels, so it's not something to be added as a fix. I still tagged it as Fixes, as for us, the feature wasn't working in all the cases we wanted it to. Things like this is questionable for adding to a "stable" release. In that corner case, if you tried to do that feature, it would just fail. This would not break any existing code. But if you wanted that full feature to work, you needed the fix. Should this be considered a "stable" backport? For any distro that wanted the full feature, the answer was "yes". For those that just want stable not to have regressions, the answer is "no". -- Steve