On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 11:22:23PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 09:50:51PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 10:50:08AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > So I'm not going to argue that your particular patches were the > > > problem here. I'm more arguing against your arguments than against the > > > patches themselves. I'm not looking for some hard black-and-white > > > rules that say "this is exactly how things have to work", because I > > > don't think such rules can exist. But I _do_ want people to see the > > > stable rules as fairly strict. > > > > I think that maintainers are balanced between the wish to satisfy their > > users and the risk of getting shouted at. Users expect stable versions > > to be bug-free. Most people I talk with have a different understanding > > of the development model than the one you present to contributors. They > > think that the .0 release is a draft and that all bugs will be fixed in > > -stable. I even know one person who uses -rc1 in production, claiming > > that these ones are stable. So end users don't necessarily understand > > the development model and ask what something they think is due : no > > known bugs. > > > > On the other hand, we've seen many regressions introduced as fixes > > into -stable that had to be reverted afterwards, or sometimes > > completed with a missing patch. > > > > I think that maintainers use the Cc:stable as a status for commits > > meaning "this is a bug fix". It's true that when you're digging into > > the commits to try to qualify fixes from features, it's really hard, > > and the new Cc:stable tag helps a lot. > > > > So probably we should incite patch contributors to add a specific > > tag such as "Fixes: 3.5 and later", so that non-important patches > > do not need the Cc:stable anymore, but users who experience an issue > > can easily spot them and ask for their inclusion. > > Huh? What's wrong with the existing way people mark stable patches to > go back to much older kernel versions? Is that not working well enough > for you? > It appears it may not be good enough for some, otherwise we would not have this discussion.
> And if something "fixes" an issue, then I want it in stable, just like > Linus wants that in his tree. > Except if it is not critical, for a given definition of the word. > Don't add another tag that requires users to dig for fixes that we are > just too lazy to be including for all users, that way is crazy. > Depends. If -stable rules are going to be followed by the letter, as has been suggested, only critical bug fixes would be applied to -stable. The idea here is to provide guidance to distribution maintainers if that is happening. This tag would mean something like "This patch fixes a real bug which affects the following releases, but it will not be applied to -stable because it is not critical". Guenter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
