Re: Proposal: Enhancing Commit Tagging for Stable Kernel Branches

[Mimi Zohar <zohar@linux.ibm.com>]

On Mon, 2024-07-15 at 10:02 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 04:09:06PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Sun, 14 Jul 2024 at 16:06, James Bottomley
> > <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> > > But we know how to enforce a unified view of process: we document it in
> > > Documentaion/process ...
> > 
> > Hahhahhahaahh.
> > 
> > Ahh, you're such a kidder, James.
> 
> Yeah, and that's the issue here, we have whole subsystems and many many
> maintainers and developers that do not follow this at all, hence our
> need to pull into stable commits that only have a "Fixes:" tag on it.
> 
> Now we can start running a bot on all submissions that says something
> like the one that I have been doing for the USB subsystem for the past
> few months, here's the text I use:
> 
> 	- You have marked a patch with a "Fixes:" tag for a commit that is in an
> 	  older released kernel, yet you do not have a cc: stable line in the
> 	  signed-off-by area at all, which means that the patch will not be
> 	  applied to any older kernel releases.  To properly fix this, please
> 	  follow the documented rules in the
> 	  Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst file for how to resolve
> 	  this.
> 
> But I doubt everyone wants to see that polute their mailing lists :(
> 
> Anyway, if people want to stick to the current, documented, process,
> great, but as-is, trying to get people to follow that is rough and not
> really working.

Sigh, I'm one of them, but I'd like to move to backporting "stable" only.
Unfortunately, the more that you backport "Fixes:" the less likely maintainers
(me) will remember to Cc stable.  Other than email, is there a way of letting
you and Sasha know to only backport those with "Stable"?.  Instead of sending
the email above to everyone, only send it maintainers who don't Cc stable
properly/haven't notified you that they will.  The emails should get everyone
else's attention. :)

Mimi