On Tue, Jun 18, 2024 at 10:43:49AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:

> So what should we do about this?  I think the first thing is to
> recognize the important role stable plays in actually finding bugs. 
> There already is a -rc tree for stable, but it doesn't actually seem to
> be very useful in finding bugs (likely because the pool of testers is
> too small), so perhaps we should discuss whether we could expand this,
> or whether we really accept that non-rc stable is part of our testing
> infrastructure.

The pool of testers is quite small, and the turnarounds for responses
are relatively tight which precludes certain kinds of testing.

> The other thing I think would help is better tooling and advice to help
> reporters find regressions in stable.  What we do a lot upstream is ask
> if they can reproduce it in mainline.  However, not everyone is
> equipped to test out mainline kernels, so we could do with helping them
> bisect it in stable (note this can be time dependent: older stable
> trees more naturally give rise to the question "has this been fixed
> upstream" making mainline testing more of an imperative).

Also questions like "can I get this building and running without
reworking my development infrastructure".