Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] The amount of -stable emails

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

On Tue, 2025-08-05 at 17:38 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> This proposal is coming as a followup to the brief IRC discussion
> that happened a few months back.
> 
> The amount of e-mails that are coming (with maintainers directly
> CCed) as a result of patches being merged to -stable is so
> overwhelming that I am not sure that people are making any productive
> use of it whatsoever.
> 
> I am personally pretty much ignoring most of it, as (a) I wouldn't
> have time to do anything else otherwise (b) I don't have a sufficient
> motivation / time to invest effort into stable in the fist place.
> 
> I feel it'd be beneficial to discuss this, and (depending on the
> outcome)perhaps make it opt-in (or opt-out) at least, with
> people/subsystems  having means how to be excluded from all that ...
> ?

Actually, if stable emails just had a header tag, it would be easy for
procmail to sort them out ... which is what I've been asking for for
years.  X-Stable-Base: and X-Stable: seem to be reasonably common and
catch most of it, but codifying the use in the kernel documentation and
using them consistently would really help.

Regards,

James