[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable workflow

Jiri Kosina jikos at kernel.org
Sat Jul 9 08:34:35 UTC 2016


On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Luck, Tony wrote:

> > In addition to that, I'd again (like during the past 5+ years, but it
> > never really happened) like to propose a stable tree discussion topic: I'd
> > like to see an attempt to make the stable workflow more oriented towards
> > "maintainers sending pull requests" rather than "random people pointing to
> > patches that should go to stable". This has been much of an issue in the
> 
> Shouldn't the common case be "Maintainer sends list of commit IDs to
> be cherry-picked" rather than a pull request?

Yeah, explicitly using term "pull request" was probably way too specific. 

The model I'd really love to see is "a person/group of people 
(maintainers) are identified and appointed responsible for what end up in 
-stable for particular subsystem", i.e. the same model we use for mainline 
development.

Whether it's actual git pull request, list of commit IDs, etc. is really 
just a technicality.

Basically: currently the model is that everybody is free to pick up a 
random commit and bounce it to -stable. What I'd like see is that this is 
routed through the maintainers instead, who then push thing upstream 
(where upstream means stable).

I know that there are exceptions where this is working properly (netdev), 
I personally am doing that also informally (when people tell me "hey, this 
should go to stable", I do whatever is necessary), but still the general 
process as such is not there.

The usual counter-argument I've always received from the stable team to 
that was "Maintainers are busy enough already, if we start enforcing this, 
we'd have much less patches in -stable". I personally don't see that as a 
bad thing. "Less is more" might apply here. If someone is really unhappy 
about state of particular subsystem in -stable, it'd mean that group of 
maintainers will have to be extended for that particular subsystem.

Thanks,

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs



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