Re: Proposal: Enhancing Commit Tagging for Stable Kernel Branches

[Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@linaro.org>]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 11:19:31AM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 11:07:30AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Mon, 2024-07-15 at 09:00 -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> > > Are developers and maintainers expected to put in stable tags the way
> > > they are expected to add Signed-off-by, or is it a fully optional
> > > practice? In the latter case, I'm not sure how much good messing with
> > > the tags will do.
> > 
> > So what's documented is
> > 
> > Fixes: is generally useful outside of stable (for bug tracing and the
> > like) and is thus not optional.  It simply means something about the
> > target was updated by the patch, but this could be spelling in comments
> > or white space and thus may not be a stable candidate.
> 
> But then look at how folks interpert the Fixes tag:
> 
> On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 12:27:55PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > I would hope that *all* commits improve on something. And if it's an
> > actual fix to a previous commit, it should say so.
> > 
> > If it's just a random improvement, it shouldn't refer to a previous
> > commit at all.
> 
> Linus (and others) see the Fixes tag differently than how you (and
> others) see it.

I don't see how those two statement conflict.

Fixes tags are totally separate from stable.  It should never be a
thing where "This patch doesn't need to be backported so leave off the
Fixes tag."

To me the main ambiguity is in cleanups.  Is this where the Improves-on
tag would be used?  I tell people to only add Fixes tags for actual
fixes.  If a patch is just silencing a static checker warning like
"delete write-only variable" then I'll mention the commit which
introduced warning, but I won't add a Fixes tag.  "We stopped using
variable "foo" in commit 2342423 ("blah blah blah").  It's unnecessary
now.  Delete it."

In Steve's case there was a debate whether it was a Fix a or new
functionality.  That line can be blurry as well.

regards,
dan carpenter