[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable workflow

[Takashi Iwai]

On Sat, 09 Jul 2016 12:05:21 +0200,
James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2016-07-08 at 17:43 -0700, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 09, 2016 at 02:37:40AM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > > I tend to think that all known bugs should be fixed, at least 
> > > because once they have been fixed, no one needs to remember about 
> > > them any more. :-)
> > > 
> > > Moreover, minor fixes don't really introduce regressions that often
> > 
> > Famous last words :)
> 
> Actually, beyond the humour, the idea that small fixes don't introduce
> regressions must be our most annoying anti-pattern.  The reality is
> that a lot of so called fixes do introduce bugs.  The way this happens
> is that a lot of these "obvious" fixes go through without any deep
> review (because they're obvious, right?) and the bugs noisily turn up
> slightly later.

And there have been quite a few cases where the fix introduces a bug
only in the older kernels while the fix itself is correct for the
latest kernel.  And, catching it only by a patch review is difficult.
Partly because the patch shows only a small context around the changes
(thus it looks apparently OK), and partly because the stable trees are
old and the maintainer's brain storage has too short refresh time,
thus often he forgets about the relevant change in the past.

IMO, we need a really better QA before releasing stable trees.  They
are all fixes, yes, but they aren't always fixes for stable trees, in
reality.


thanks,

Takashi