[Ksummit-2013-discuss] When to push bug fixes to mainline

[Nicholas A. Bellinger]

On Thu, 2013-07-11 at 20:50 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 03:01:17PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > <rant>
> >   I'm sitting on top of over 170 more patches that have been marked for
> >   the stable releases right now that are not included in this set of
> >   releases.  The fact that there are this many patches for stable stuff
> >   that are waiting to be merged through the main -rc1 merge window cycle
> >   is worrying to me.
> > 
> >   Why are subsystem maintainers holding on to fixes that are
> >   _supposedly_ affecting all users?  I mean, 21 powerpc core changes
> >   that I don't see until a -rc1 merge?  It's as if developers don't
> >   expect people to use a .0 release and are relying on me to get the
> >   fixes they have burried in their trees out to users.  That's not that
> >   nice.  6 "core" iscsi-target fixes?  That's the sign of either a
> >   broken subsystem maintainer, or a lack of understanding what the
> >   normal -rc kernel releases are supposed to be for.
> 

In my defense here, the patches that have been CC'ed to 3.10.y stable
are to address bugs in iser-target, and it's interaction with existing
iscsi-target code after the large set of refactoring changes went in to
support multi-transport operation.

The reasons that they where not included in a v3.10-rc pull request is
because the bugs where found sufficiently late enough in the cycle, and
required large enough changes plus a non trival amount of manual failure
injection testing to verify their correctness.

--nab