[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable workflow

[Steven Rostedt]

On Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:38:05 +0200
"Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw at rjwysocki.net> wrote:

> However, "long-term stable" trees started to appear at one point and those are
> quite different and serve a different purpose.  I'm not quite sure if handling
> them in the same way as 4.6.y is really the best approach.  At least it seems
> to lead to some mismatch between the expectations and what is really delivered.

I think what happens is simply time. For 4.6.y stable kernels, there's
nothing but bug fixes to add to them. But when you talk about older
kernels, there is a tendency to add stuff that could be questionable
about how much of a "fix" something is. Not to mention, the older a
kernel is, the more it diverges from mainline, and there may be fixes
in mainline, that are "sorta" fixes for those kernels.

I've had fixes that fixed a bug that mutated over time. In older
kernels, it was still a bug, but perhaps not as critical. In the newer
kernels, the bug made a bigger impact. Sometimes it was simply that the
newer kernel was much more likely to trigger the race condition. How
far back to have a fix go becomes a gray area. Perhaps the fix for
4.6.y is obviously correct, but that same fix may not be so obvious for
older kernels.

-- Steve