[Ksummit-2013-discuss] [ATTEND] DT, maintainership, development process

Jiri Kosina jkosina at suse.cz
Mon Jul 29 16:39:43 UTC 2013


On Mon, 29 Jul 2013, Takashi Iwai wrote:

> In the case of stable kernels, there is a review phase, where the
> patches aren't committed to the git tree yet.  It happens often that
> inappropriate patches are dropped during it.  If the processing is
> changed to use a git pull, we'll have to add a revert commit instead
> of dropping a patch, which is messy as a stable tree.  This is a
> disadvantage of git pull, at least.

The merit of my proposal really is about shifting the responsibility.

Stable team is now sending patches (collected in a rather fuzzy way) out 
for review, and they get passively approved. It's not clear who is then 
responsible for the patch having been applied to -stable. Is the the patch 
author, is it someone in the SOB chain, is it stable team?

With pull requests, there is a person who can be clearly identified as 
responsible -- the maintainer (with stable team also having their portion 
of responsibility of course for actually pulling the branch).

How the patches that end up in the for-stable branch are reviewed is 
completely up to the particular subsystem (and will very likely copy the 
review process that is happening in that particular subsystem for Linus' 
tree already).

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs


More information about the Ksummit-2013-discuss mailing list