[Ksummit-discuss] "Maintainer summit" invitation discussion

[Laura Abbott]

On 04/19/2017 09:18 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 8:37 AM, Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On 4/18/2017 4:13 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm not sure who those people actually are, but I suspect this list
>>> contains people who can point to each tech lead.. I think it's Laura
>>> Abbott for Fedora, for example?
>>
>> There really is no pain point for Fedora.  They take a very simple
>> approach: in rawhide, they pull latest git once you hit the -rc cycles
>> and build it, otherwise it's the latest released kernel; in actual
>> releases, they pull stable tree point releases as they are released (not
>> long term stable, they upgrade to a new stable tree fairly regularly).
>> They really don't do much in the way of having to integrate changes into
>> their kernel (intentionally), it's just a constant rolling update game
>> using newer and newer tarballs.  So, the pain is not in Fedora, it's in
>> RHEL.  What we do there is so totally different from Fedora and hurts so
>> bad as a developer...but I don't know if you really care to even talk
>> about that at the summit since, to be fair, it's largely a consequence
>> of our business model.
> 
> Yeah, I don't think we can do much about distros that intentionally
> want to stay behind and backport. Admittedly Android seems to be very
> much in that camp too, but I'd at least want to talk to them more.
> RHEL I feel knows what it's doing and isn't causing the kinds of
> issues Android is anyway.
> 
> That said, even with Fedora I think Laura was at the KS last year, and
> did talk about what she sees as the stable kernel process. So Fedora
> may not be a "painpoint", but may well be relevant for the "meet with
> people and talk about process issues once a year".
> 
> Of course, if it really is a question of "we have no problems and no
> reason to even be there" for Fedora, then that's one (or two) less
> people to worry about ;)
> 
>                  Linus

I wouldn't say we have no problems or pain points. It's a different
kind of paint point than what RHEL deals with. The building and
integration is simpler but the frequent updates can be difficult
for end users who are not experienced kernel developers. I brought
up bug reporting last year and I still consider that to be an
issue this year. A good example is 
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194911 which didn't really 
make progress until
I sent out a separate e-mail thread summarizing the bisections
people did. There are only 2 of us on Fedora so having to
guide users along on every bug doesn't scale well.

The irregular timing of stable updates also makes it difficult
to give an answer to users who want to know "when will this
be fixed".

Thanks,
Laura