Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] The amount of -stable emails

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 12:49:02PM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Tue, 2025-08-05 at 17:38 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > This proposal is coming as a followup to the brief IRC discussion
> > that happened a few months back.
> > 
> > The amount of e-mails that are coming (with maintainers directly
> > CCed) as a result of patches being merged to -stable is so
> > overwhelming that I am not sure that people are making any productive
> > use of it whatsoever.
> > 
> > I am personally pretty much ignoring most of it, as (a) I wouldn't
> > have time to do anything else otherwise (b) I don't have a sufficient
> > motivation / time to invest effort into stable in the fist place.
> > 
> > I feel it'd be beneficial to discuss this, and (depending on the
> > outcome)perhaps make it opt-in (or opt-out) at least, with
> > people/subsystems  having means how to be excluded from all that ...
> > ?
> 
> Actually, if stable emails just had a header tag, it would be easy for
> procmail to sort them out ... which is what I've been asking for for
> years.  X-Stable-Base: and X-Stable: seem to be reasonably common and
> catch most of it, but codifying the use in the kernel documentation and
> using them consistently would really help.

These "a patch has been added to the stable queue" has had the following
X- tags on them since August 2023:

	X-stable: commit
	X-Patchwork-Hint: ignore

and I'm sure I only added that because you, or someone else, asked :)

You can also filter on stable-commits@vger.kernel.org, which is what I
do locally.

So filter away!

thanks,

greg k-h