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

[Greg KH]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 09:09:47PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> > > Agreed, and I am of course not asking anybody to decide for distros; just 
> > > trying to make the decision process easier for them.
> > > 
> > > Even such a minimal categorization of bugs such as
> > 
> > First off, _who_ is going to do this categorization?  And how do you
> > know it is correct?  Usually the original submitter doesn't know this,
> > and often times, the maintainer doesn't either (sadly.)
> 
> Well, if neither maintainer, nor submitter, nor the original author of the 
> patch knows what the actual impact of the patch is, I don't think it 
> qualifies for stable :)

Not true at all.  It looks like a simple bug fix to the submitter and
maintainer, and then to me, so I take it.  Turns out, the fix solves the
"corrupts your entire raid filesystem on shutdown" problem, but I didn't
know that at the time.

All I knew was that it was a bugfix, that's the problem with trying to
categorize things.  It doesn't work as usually the scope of the problem
is only determined after the fact.

That's what makes distros good, they provide that service to their
users, and their users trust them for that.  All I can provide as the
community is all the bugfixes that I can find.

thanks,

greg k-h