Re: Proposal: Enhancing Commit Tagging for Stable Kernel Branches

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 03:20:48PM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:

> Here you seem to be assuming that every commit with a Fixes tag for a
> prior release should be in stable ... I don't think that's true at all.

I think that is the main issue here. Having talked to enough people in
the server/enterprise space there are a lot of different ideas about
what should be backported into the various kernel forks out there.

Just looking at the patch meta data there is a spectrum of:
   No-Fixes -> Fixes -> Fixes&Stable

As I maintainer I don't really have a stake in backporter's policies. I
feel like the best I can do is try hard to mark things with Fixes tags
and provide quality commit messages. I know the various forks will
make decisions based on that.

IMHO the cc stable is a nice way to provide an additional opinion that
the patch was thought to be critical when it was merged. People
running forks should really examine those patches closely.

Jason