On 05/08/2013 08:55 AM, Johannes Berg wrote: > On Tue, 2013-05-07 at 16:53 -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: >> Today the backports project provides support to backport down to >> 2.6.24 for some subsystems. While this is good for users in practice >> for development and maintenance this is quite a bit of overhead. Apart >> from older kernels there are also gaps in between stable releases that >> are not supported. For example 3.8 and 3.4 are supported but anything >> in between is not (3.5, 3.6, 3.7), but we still do support them on the >> backports project. At times this may mean a stable fix may get >> propagated onto a the linux-3.4.y branch but obviously not the the >> linux-3.5.y branch. If backporting expressing this becomes a bit >> complex and we have dealt with it. In short, its a pain. >> >> I'd like to see what folks thought if we went ahead and *only* >> supported kernels listed on kernel.org as supported. This would help >> with the Linux kernel maintainer effort by also persuading users to >> upgrade to stable releases as well as educating around this. >> >> If v3.10 backported releases are too soon to do this I propose we >> seriously consider it for v3.11 releases. Any thoughts? > > I'm sure I'd still have to support other kernels random customers might > be on (customers, they don't always do the smart thing ;-) ). I could do > that myself of course, but then where would I stick the support patches? > > Maybe we could do a compromise and drop support for no longer supported > kernels, but only a few years later? If we put the cutoff at 3 years now > we'd drop everything before 2.6.34, for example. > > johannes I it is not often that something compat depends on gets backported into some longterm kernel. The majority ~90% of backports added to compat are not backported to any longterm kernel. If we want to support some kernel version I do not think it is a hard task to support the versions in between. Instead of supporting everything back to 2.6.34 I would like to got to 2.6.32 because this was used in Debian squeeze, RedHat 6 and some Ubuntu long term version. Dropping support for kernel versions not older than a year but not supported any more is a bad idea, because the big distributions often pick a non longterm kernel as their distribution kernel. Than we would not even support the recent Ubuntu versions for a long time. Ubuntu 12.10 uses kernel 3.5 and Ubuntu 13.04 uses 3.8, both are no longterm kernel versions. Hauke -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe backports" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
