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

Jason Cooper jason at lakedaemon.net
Mon Jul 29 18:12:56 UTC 2013


On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 01:58:54PM -0400, Paul Gortmaker wrote:
> On 13-07-29 01:36 PM, Jason Cooper wrote:
...
> > not lost.  Particularly, common commit ids, and trackability.
> 
> You won't get common commit IDs.  There already is the boilerplate 1st
> line in each saying 'commit abcd1234f... upstream" which achieves the
> mapping.  See below why that is generally as good as it gets.

Well, 'tag --contains' won't match it, but I see your point below.

> > 
> > Would it be possible for patches developers think are candidates for
> > -stable inclusion be sent to the stable mailinglist before they are in
> > tree?  Then, if the stable maintainers feel it's appropriate for
> > -stable, they'll give and 'Acked-by: <...> # v3.10.x'.  At that point,
> > the subsystem maintainer can put it in a branch to be pulled into Linus'
> > tree and then into the appropriate -stable tree.
> 
> No. Won't work.  You'd be asking the maintainer to put the commit on
> the lowest common denominator for all stable releases.  And then be
> asking Linus to pull little fragmented branches with v2.6.32 as their
> baseline commit -- pushing the work of a "forward port" onto the hands
> of the person doing the merge.  Plus we generally want the commit to
> look roughly applicable to the rc1 release it is merged into, which
> means the backporting work (if any) has to land on the person wanting
> to do the stable backport.  And if the backport is non-trivial, then
> that is a darn good sign that they seriously might want to consider
> the applicability of that commit to the old release.  It was one of
> the metrics that I sure considered.

Very good point.  Most of my stable fixes have been fairly straight
forward, and I hadn't yet experienced the joy of backporting vs.
forwardporting anything intricate.  Backporting definitely provides a
gauge of appropriateness for stable.

thx,

Jason.


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