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

[Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2025, Greg KH 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.
> 
> These "a patch has been added to the stable queue" has had the following
> X- tags on them since August 2023:
> 
> 	X-stable: commit
> 	X-Patchwork-Hint: ignore
> 
> and I'm sure I only added that because you, or someone else, asked :)
> 
> You can also filter on stable-commits@vger.kernel.org, which is what I
> do locally.
> 
> So filter away!

The question is whether it's really worth all the e-mail traffic this is 
generating, if people are just filtering those away.

For context searches if some particular information regarding stable 
patch history is needed, we can still do lore/lei queries nicely and 
easily.
Is there any other usecase (that people are actually actively using) for 
it?

Thanks,

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs