The current standard for backporting to stable is rather ad hoc. Not everyone will cc stable on bug fixes, and even if they do, if the patch does not apply cleanly to the stable branches, it often gets dropped if no one notices or cares enough to do the backporting. Historically, the XFS community has avoided backports via cc’ing stable and via AUTOSEL due to concerns of accidentally introducing new bugs to the stable branches. However, over the last year, XFS has developed a new strategy for managing stable backports. A “stable maintainer” role has been created for each stable branch to identify, apply, and test potential backports before they are sent to the stable mailing list. This provides better monitoring of the stable branches which reduces the risk of introducing new bugs to stable and lessens the possibility of bug fixes getting dropped on their way to stable. XFS has benefited from this new backporting procedure and perhaps other filesystems would as well. - Leah
