On Fri, 2020-12-04 at 10:49 -0500, Sasha Levin wrote: > On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 09:27:28AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > > On 01/12/20 00:59, Sasha Levin wrote: > > > > > > It's quite easy to NAK a patch too, just reply saying "no" and it'll be > > > dropped (just like this patch was dropped right after your first reply) > > > so the burden on maintainers is minimal. > > > > The maintainers are _already_ marking patches with "Cc: stable". That > > They're not, though. Some forget, some subsystems don't mark anything, > some don't mark it as it's not stable material when it lands in their > tree but then it turns out to be one if it sits there for too long. > > > (plus backports) is where the burden on maintainers should start and > > end. I don't see the need to second guess them. > > This is similar to describing our CI infrastructure as "second > guessing": why are we second guessing authors and maintainers who are > obviously doing the right thing by testing their patches and reporting > issues to them? > > Are you saying that you have always gotten stable tags right? never > missed a stable tag where one should go? I think this simply adds to the burden of being a maintainer without all that much value. I think the primary value here would be getting people to upgrade to current versions rather than backporting to nominally stable and relatively actively changed old versions. This is very much related to this thread about trivial patches and maintainer burdening: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1c7d7fde126bc0acf825766de64bf2f9b888f216.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/