Re: Proposal: Enhancing Commit Tagging for Stable Kernel Branches

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

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.

Which, I guess, is the issue I'm trying to resolve.

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha