[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable issues

[Takashi Iwai]

At Mon, 5 May 2014 17:39:28 +0200,
Jan Kara wrote:
> 
> On Mon 05-05-14 17:23:18, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > At Mon, 5 May 2014 09:41:26 -0400,
> > Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > > The challenge is that companies generally need to be able to make that
> > > decision at least 3-6 months ahead of time for planning purposes, and
> > > this requires that companies be willing to actually communicate their
> > > stablization plans externally ahead of time.  Which, unfortuantely,
> > > may or may not always be practical.
> > > 
> > > And of course, depending on how many patches get integrated into said
> > > "enterprise" kernel, it might end up being very far from the official
> > > upstream stable kernel, so it might or might not matter in any case.
> > 
> > Or, other way round: can the upstream LTS kernel be defined earlier?
> > Then distros may align to it when it's known beforehand.
> > It'd be even helpful for subsystem maintainers to decide whether some
> > big infrastructure change should be applied or postponed.
>   Well, but Greg doesn't want to declare a kernel LTS before it is released
> exactly so that people don't cram in lots of imature stuff which needs to
> be fixed up later. And I agree with him that this is going to happen if he
> would declare LTS kernels in advance. So I don't think this is a good
> alternative.

I agree with such a possible risk.  OTOH, if a big change (or file
renames) happens just after LTS kernel, it may make impossible to
carry even a small trivial fix back to LTS kernel.  So, it can be also
a demerit, too.


thanks,

Takashi