[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] stable kernel stuff and grumpy maintainers

[Steven Rostedt]

On Mon, 2012-06-18 at 13:53 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 06/18/2012 01:50 PM, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > 
> > Well, sometimes it's not immediately obvious from the changelog what kind 
> > of bug is actually being fixed (and yes, I know that for some of the 
> > security fixes this is on purpose :-) ).
> > 
> > So, speaking with my SLES kernel maintainer hat on, having some 
> > 'categorization' of the bug that is being fixed by a particular -stable 
> > patch, would be extremely helpful.
> > 
> 
> This seems to be going down the rathole that we tried to address with
> the "Impact:" notes in -tip.  It didn't work :(

I think the problem with this was that we required that tag for all
commits. We started getting redundancy, especially when the subject
basically stated the impact as well.

Then we also had:

   Impact: clean up

For things like code clean ups and such. It did become a bit of a
burden, and I thought it made the change log a bit ugly. I still cringe
when I'm going through old commits and see them.

But I do believe that the idea was valid, just the way we implemented it
was flawed. Adding a tag or something to what is fixed may be useful.
And only add it for things that actually fix something. Or perhaps
require it for any commit that has a stable tag on it. If you Cc,
stable, you should have something like:

  Cc: stable at vger.kernel.org
  Fixes: Crash on board Foo

-- Steve