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

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2018-09-05 at 14:53 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Sep 2018, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> > The rule should be: if it doesn't fix a user visible bug, it
> > doesn't go 
> > into stable.
> 
> So I just looked at the latest (and newest) stable 4.18.5. It
> contains 22
> patches:
> 
> 	$ grep "commit [a-f0-9]\+ upstream" ChangeLog-4.18.5
> 	    commit a13f085d111e90469faf2d9965eb39b11c114d7e upstream.
> 	    commit bed4ff1ed4d8f2ef5007c5c6ae1b29c5677a3632 upstream.
> 	    commit c463a158cb6c5d9a85b7d894cd4f8116e8bd6be0 upstream.
> 	    commit 1204e35bedf4e5015cda559ed8c84789a6dae24e upstream.
> 	    commit 281e878eab191cce4259abbbf1a0322e3adae02c upstream.
> 	    commit 3dbe97efe8bf450b183d6dee2305cbc032e6b8a4 upstream.
> 	    commit 91a2968e245d6ba616db37001fa1a043078b1a65 upstream.
> 	    commit 4ce6435820d1f1cc2c2788e232735eb244bcc8a3 upstream.
> 	    commit 9d64b539b738fc181442caab95f1f76d9bd58539 upstream.
> 	    commit d3252ace0bc652a1a244455556b6a549f969bf99 upstream.
> 	    commit 7797167ffde1f00446301cb22b37b7c03194cfaf upstream.
> 	    commit 3b885ac1dc35b87a39ee176a6c7e2af9c789d8b8 upstream.
> 	    commit ddf74e79a54070f277ae520722d3bab7f7a6c67a upstream.
> 	    commit de5372da605d3bca46e3102bab51b7e1c0e0a6f6 upstream.
> 	    commit 1a5d5e5d51e75a5bca67dadbcea8c841934b7b85 upstream.
> 	    commit 6d44acae1937b81cf8115ada8958e04f601f3f2e upstream.
> 	    commit c40a56a7818cfe735fc93a69e1875f8bba834483 upstream.
> 	    commit 6ea2738e0ca0e626c75202fb051c1e88d7a950fa upstream.
> 	    commit 9f515cdb411ef34f1aaf4c40bb0c932cf6db5de1 upstream.
> 	    commit 0d83432811f26871295a9bc24d3c387924da6071 upstream.
> 	    commit 36ecc1481dc8d8c52d43ba18c6b642c1d2fde789 upstream.
> 	    commit b748f2de4b2f578599f46c6000683a8da755bf68 upstream.
> 
> Just randomly scrolling through those, I am wondering how at least
> 
> 	7797167ffde1f00446301cb22b37b7c03194cfaf
> 	3b885ac1dc35b87a39ee176a6c7e2af9c789d8b8
> 
> made it past any stable tree acceptance criteria.
> 
> They are memory ordering changes (so exactly area which is generally 
> fragile by itself and the risk of regressions simply can't be
> completely ignored), yet they fix absolutely no functional issue.
> 
> In addition to that, they all exist upstream only for one single -rc,
> so the public testing exposure is also currently minimal.
> 
> Yeah, I know I know, those are parisc, so noone cares anyway :P but
> that's really just the first randomly chosen kernel, with a small
> number of patches, and still 10% of them are something we'd not want
> to put into an enterprise distro kernel without a lot of
> justification and regression testing.

[puts PA-RISC hat on]

The maintainers believe these two patches will fix a persistent
segmentation fault problem that's blocking forward progress on the
debian parisc port.  So, given the parisc specificity of the patches
and the maintainer input, I very much think they fit the criteria.

James