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

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 02:41:24PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 11:29 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, the point I'm making is that Q&A is limited and often even
> > actively misleading ("Hey, I have three tested-by's, so it must be
> > fine"), and we might actually want to have a new class of
> > "non-critical patch that might be worth backporting to stable, but
> > only do so after it's been in a release for some time". Because while
> > it might be an "obvious" fix, maybe it's not critical enough that it
> > needs to be backported _now_ - maybe it could wait a month or two, and
> > get wider testing.
> 
> Should we add another stable tag?
> 
> Have the default Cc: stable have to wait a rc or two in mainline before
> it makes its way to the stable tree. Have a stable-critical for those
> that are bugs that are security fixes than need to be backported ASAP.

People mark stable patches that way already today with a:
	Cc: stable <stable at vger.kernel.org> # delay for 3.12-rc4
or some such wording.  I take those and don't apply them until the noted
release happens, so you can do this if needed.

greg k-h