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

[Ben Hutchings]

On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 22:10 +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 03:43:09PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 12:11 -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > I guess the thing is, are stable patches prone to regressions. Do we
> > just do that for patches that we think are too complex and may cause
> > some harm. Of course, there's the question about having a clue about
> > what patches might cause harm or not.
> 
> We'd probably better switch the tag to be "# now" to imply that we don't
> want to delay them, and that by default those merged prior to rc4 are all
> postponed.

I think this might work.  I definitely agree that most fixes aren't
worth the risk of allowing into a stable release that quickly, so it's
the right default.

> I suspect that the switching could be mostly automated this way,
> avoiding to add burden to Greg :
> 
>   - if commit ID >= -rc4
>     move to immediate queue, it's a "critical" fix as per Linus' rules
> 
>   - if Cc: stable line has "now" at the end, move to immediate queue as
>     the maintainer takes this reponsibility ;
> 
>   - otherwise move to the next .2 queue.

I can't speak for Greg, but that seems reasonably easy to implement.
(Which I would have to do, as I was unable to reuse Greg's scripts.)

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Humans are not rational beings; they are rationalising beings.
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