On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 10:43:28PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote: >On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Sasha Levin wrote: > >> So I think that Linus's claim that users come first applies here as >> well. If there's a user that cares about a particular feature being >> broken, then we go ahead and fix his bug rather then ignoring him. > >So one extreme is fixing -stable *iff* users actually do report an issue. > >The other extreme is backporting everything that potentially looks like a >potential fix of "something" (according to some arbitrary metric), >pro-actively. > >The former voilates the "users first" rule, the latter has a very, very >high risk of regressions. > >So this whole debate is about finding a compromise. > >My gut feeling always was that the statement in > > Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst > >is very reasonable, but making the process way more "aggresive" when >backporting patches is breaking much of its original spirit for me. I agree that as an enterprise distro taking everything from -stable isn't the best idea. Ideally you'd want to be close to the first extreme you've mentioned and only take commits if customers are asking you to do so. I think that the rule we're trying to agree upon is the "It must fix a real bug that bothers people". I think that we can agree that it's impossible to expect every single Linux user to go on LKML and complain about a bug he encountered, so the rule quickly becomes "It must fix a real bug that can bother people". My "aggressiveness" comes from the whole "bother" part: it doesn't have to be critical, it doesn't have to cause data corruption, it doesn't have to be a security issue. It's enough that the bug actually affects a user in a way he didn't expect it to (if a user doesn't have expectations, it would fall under the "This could be a problem..." exception. We can go into a discussion about what exactly "bothering" is, but on the flip side, the whole -stable tag is just a way for folks to indicate they want a given patch reviewed for stable, it's not actually a guarantee of whether the patch will go in to -stable or not.
