[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Stable trees and release time

[Mark Brown]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 10:58:45AM +0100, James Bottomley wrote:

> This really shouldn't be an issue: stable trees are backported from
> upstream.  The patch (should) work in upstream, so it should work in
> stable.  There are only a few real cases you need to worry about:

>    1. Buggy patch in upstream backported to stable. (will be caught and
>       the fix backported soon)
>    2. Missing precursor causing issues in stable alone.
>    3. Bug introduced when hand applying.

> The chances of one of these happening is non-zero, but the criteria for
> stable should mean its still better odds than the odds of hitting the
> bug it was fixing.

Some of those are substantial enough to be worth worrying about,
especially the missing precursor issues.  It's rarely an issue with the
human generated backports but the automated ones don't have a sense of
context in the selection.

There's also a risk/reward tradeoff to consider with more minor issues,
especially performance related ones.  We want people to be enthusiastic
about taking stable updates and every time they find a problem with a
backport that works against them doing that.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/attachments/20180905/87ca3c7e/attachment.sig>