On 2026/07/28 16:47, Michael Tokarev wrote:
On 7/28/26 09:54, Akihiko Odaki wrote:
...
The consequence of the bug this patch fixes is a NULL pointer
dereference and denial-of-service. docs/devel/stable-process.rst says:
> Generally, the following patches are considered stable material:
>
> * Patches that fix severe issues, like fixes for CVEs
> * Patches that fix regressions
In these two cases, changes are *definitely* for-stable. Other changes -
fixing bugs but without regressions or CVEs - might also be for stable,
but it is more case-by-case material.
You haven't quoted the very next paragraph from this document though:
If you think the patch would be important for users of the current
release
(or for a distribution picking fixes), it is usually a good candidate
for stable.
Without "regular bug fixes" in stable we wont survive ;)
And I don't think this match with the description. It still does fix a
bug, and I think you can cleanly backport it and you tend to backport
such a patch.
What I'm thinking is more like - all at once - does the bug affects users
(is the subsystem in question actually used or not (it might be some
very niche thing); is it a fast-moving target so only very recent code
makes sense in the first place and so there's no reason to back-port
fixes; can the bug be triggered in real life or just theoretical (like,
it is not a problem in current code but future changes might trigger it);
is it more a cosmetic thing or something like a crash; and so on. And
on the other hand, whenever this is a trivial fix or something more
complex which might cause bugs by its own.
In this particular case, the fix is trivial and the subsystem is in
use, but if this bug can be seen in real life I still don't know.
At least now I know why you haven't considered it for-stable in
the first place - because you assumed only CVE and regression fixes
should go there :)
Indeed I forgot to quote the paragraph. This bug can only be triggered
by a malfunctional guest and does not have a practical impact. I usually
consider a fix that address a user-provided bug report for stable.
Regards,
Akihiko Odaki
