[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable workflow

[Johannes Berg]

On Sat, 2016-07-09 at 10:34 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> 
> 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), 

Note that for subsets of the networking tree, particularly wireless, we
*do* add Cc: stable tags, but usually that's me adding the tag.

> 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.
> 

I'm not convinced by that line of reasoning, especially since in my
experience the unhappy people are often the least qualified to actually
determine the impact of a patch.


Perhaps a hybrid model, close to what we have today, would work? If a
patch is proposed for stable, instead of including it by default, ask
the maintainer(s) to separately acknowledge the patch for stable? IOW,
rather than sending a patchbomb that requires an explicit NACK (with
the previously discussed signal/noise problem), just send a list of
commits and ask maintainers to edit it? They could remove and add
commits then.

Yes, maintainers would still have some more work with that than the
current "fire & forget" approach, but it's more "fire & get a reminder"
rather than what you're proposing which would require me to track it
all, across various stable releases managed by various people, which
frankly I can't imagine being able to do (or even find qualified people
willing to help me do that, right now.)

johannes