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

Greg KH greg at kroah.com
Tue Jun 19 17:49:24 UTC 2012


On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 10:58:23AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 11:08:06AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > > <SNIP>
> > > The toughest part for me right now is finding all the patches to apply,
> > > (i.e. digging through distro kernel trees) and dealing with random
> > > emails from people who don't read Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt.
> > 
> > Bah.  If you're having to go digging in distro trees then distro people
> > need a vigorous wedgie. 
> 
> How big of a problem is this? My own track record is not necessarily perfect
> in this regard but for the important fixes I'm aware of they were being
> upstreamed at the same time they were merged to a distro tree and later
> removed when -stable released. I was under the impression that this was
> typically the case.

Sometimes, yes.

> Is it a case that the distro tree fixes are not core patches or are they
> backports that are not getting resubmitted for -stable?

It's a case that distros are putting patches into their trees that are
backports of bugfixes that are upstream, and are not letting me know
that they should be included in the stable tree.

Debian is the exception, they do a wonderful job, thanks to Ben and
others.  Fedora and Canonical are getting better, but could still
improve, a bunch.

openSUSE isn't doing anything at all, although I admit that is probably
due to me leaving there, as I previously had been doing that myself, and
no one at openSUSE realizing it was being done and that someone else
needed to now do it.

Don't get me started about the "embedded" distros, I never see anything
from them, nor from anywhere else (Arch and Mint, do they even have a
kernel team?  Gentoo, what happened to their kernel developers?)

thanks,

greg k-h


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