Re: Proposal: Enhancing Commit Tagging for Stable Kernel Branches

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Mon, 2024-07-15 at 09:00 -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
[...]
> So, to me, the real question here is: what is the actual policy?

This thread does demonstrate huge confusion around that.  I'd really
like to try to run with what's documented because that's the easiest
for Maintainers to enforce.

> 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.

cc:stable is only for trees opting in to the stable process to mark
commits that should be backported (i.e. is optional).

Backport requests for upstream commits that didn't get a cc:stable tag
go to the stable list, but I'll look into improving the automation
around it.

James