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

Greg KH greg at kroah.com
Wed Jun 20 15:50:16 UTC 2012


On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 09:37:01AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 10:49:24AM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> 
> err.... ok, right. I'm certainly guilty of this one. I was going to blame
> bad attitude but that's not it. I considered -stable to be for functional
> fixes due to reading this rule.
> 
>  - It must fix a problem that causes a build error (but not for things
>    marked CONFIG_BROKEN), an oops, a hang, data corruption, a real
>    security issue, or some "oh, that's not good" issue.  In short, something
>    critical.
> 
> Many of the patches I backport are performance related. Some are throughput
> or latency style fixes and others are interactivity related particularly
> when IO is involved. These are not "critical". In some cases there are
> multiple patches required and that falls foul of the "It must fix only
> one thing." rule.
> 
> Hence, if I discover something really bad and fix it in mainline then I tag
> it for -stable. However, I was not reposting patches for -stable that fixed
> more subtle issues because they were not critical, just desirable. Maybe
> the rules need a bit of a touchup or a public clarification for people
> who backport for distributions but do not merge to -stable?

The patch makes sense to me, as long as people actually read this file
and know to follow it (which seems to be the biggest problem these
days...)

Care to resend it with a signed-off-by so I can queue it up?

thanks,

greg k-h


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