From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: From: "Rafael J. Wysocki" To: Guenter Roeck Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:38:05 +0200 Message-ID: <2340101.mYDzTnT1Lv@vostro.rjw.lan> In-Reply-To: <578293C5.1090503@roeck-us.net> References: <20160710170117.GI26097@thunk.org> <578293C5.1090503@roeck-us.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Cc: Jason Cooper , ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org, James Bottomley , ksummit-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable workflow List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Sunday, July 10, 2016 11:28:21 AM Guenter Roeck wrote: > On 07/10/2016 10:01 AM, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > > On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 09:52:04PM +0530, Vinod Koul wrote: > >> > >> For patch merge, the expectation is that it is tested against upstream. > >> For stable, should we also mandate that it be verified against the stable > >> tree(s) as well, or if Maintainer feels it is stable material then we > >> can ask Submitters to test before CCing stable... > > > > This is simply not realistic. > > > Agreed. Testing has to happen on the back-end side. > > > There are **eleven** stable or longterm trees listed on kernel.org. > > I think this is one of the problems we are having: There are way too many > stable / longterm trees. So going back to the origins of -stable, the problem it was invented to address at that time, IIRC, was that people started to perceive switching over to the kernels released by Linus as risky, because it was hard to get fixes for bugs found in them. The idea at that time was to collect the fixes (and fixes only) in a "stable" tree, so that whoever decided to use the latest kernel released by Linus could get them readily, but without burdening maintainers with having their own "stable" branches and similar. And that was going to last until the next kernel release from Linus, at which point a new "stable" tree was to be started. That's what the 4.6.y "stable" series is today. To me, that particular part has been very successful and it actually works well enough, so I wouldn't change anything in it. However, "long-term stable" trees started to appear at one point and those are quite different and serve a different purpose. I'm not quite sure if handling them in the same way as 4.6.y is really the best approach. At least it seems to lead to some mismatch between the expectations and what is really delivered. Thanks, Rafael