Hi Thorsten Quoting a bit selectively and out of order to comment on a few unrelated aspects of this (meta-)discussion: Thorsten Leemhuis <regressions@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On 14.11.24 10:52, Johannes Berg wrote: >> On Thu, 2024-11-14 at 10:24 +0100, Linux regression tracking (Thorsten >> Leemhuis) wrote: >>> >>> Sigh. >> >> Please. You really should consider adjusting your attitude on all this. > > If the revert is only merged during the merge window, it will likely > take [...] four additional weeks if we are really unlucky. > > Things like that bother me -- and thus, yes, sorry, also influence my > attitude, which lead to the quoted "sigh". It's just that "fixes are > there, they just take a long time to reach mainline and stable releases" > is the biggest problem I see during my regression tracking work. I understand your frustration, certainly, and I get that you are tasked with a thankless job in trying to improve the regression handling situation. However, I also agree with Johannes that by letting your frustration shine through (which is basically what you're doing with that "sigh"), you are turning a general frustration at a difficult systemic problem into animosity towards the *person* you are directing your email at. This comes across as incredibly condescending, and it only fosters animosity in the other direction, even creating a perverse incentive to just ignore regressions entirely, as Johannes also pointed out in his follow-up email[0]. Or to put it another way: the actual patch being discussed here should be held up as an example of a *successful* regression handling: A relatively obscure issue was reported, and within a week a fix was committed to the relevant subsystem tree. If we had been *anywhere* else in the cycle than where we are right now, this would have percolated up to Linus' tree in time for the next -rc, or at the very latest one week later. Judging from the numbers you presented at LPC, this would be a very timely fix in all cases. So yes, it's unfortunate that this happened to land at an unlucky time in the cycle, and yes, in the ideal world this would just have been fast-tracked. But by reacting with frustration to something that, for all intents and purposes, is a proper and timely handling of a regression, you are antagonising people and hurting your cause, not helping it. As for a concrete suggestion for how this could have been handled better, if you had followed up your "Many thx for taking care of this!" (which was great!) with a "I noticed there's an opportunity to get this in before 6.12 is released, which will mean this gets to users several weeks faster. Would you mind asking Linus to (cherry-pick/pull) this out of order, as he has indicated he is willing to do", instead of the "sigh, you are doing this wrong", you would have a much higher chance of actually getting results. As a side note, on this point... > My approach/attitude is based on actions from Linus and/or what I expect > he wants me to do, so let's bring him in to give him a chance to state > if I went to far here. ...I will add that I personally find the whole "appeal to authority" approach you are taking with the regression handling processes to be somewhat off-putting. "Because Linus says so" is a terrible argument for doing anything (on its own). If you can't persuade people by the strength of your argument, appealing to authority will at best get you grudging least-effort compliance, and at worst it will be actively harmful because you antagonise people. And yes, convincing people to change the way they work is hard, especially when the ask is for them to do *more* work. That doesn't mean it is impossible, but it takes time and patience and a variety of approaches to succeed in the long term. Note that I am saying all of the above as someone who is generally sympathetic to the goals of your work (as I am sure you are aware, since you're using my exchange with Linus about this in your slides :)). I do not believe you are trying to antagonise people on purpose, so please view the above as a good faith attempt at providing some feedback on how you can continue this work without ending up doing so unintentionally. -Toke [0] https://lore.kernel.org/r/35bee1c6146cf261ad6b47f585a5b454ad0763ec.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
