On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 03:01:17PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > <rant> > I'm sitting on top of over 170 more patches that have been marked for > the stable releases right now that are not included in this set of > releases. The fact that there are this many patches for stable stuff > that are waiting to be merged through the main -rc1 merge window cycle > is worrying to me. > > Why are subsystem maintainers holding on to fixes that are > _supposedly_ affecting all users? I mean, 21 powerpc core changes > that I don't see until a -rc1 merge? It's as if developers don't > expect people to use a .0 release and are relying on me to get the > fixes they have burried in their trees out to users. That's not that > nice. 6 "core" iscsi-target fixes? That's the sign of either a > broken subsystem maintainer, or a lack of understanding what the > normal -rc kernel releases are supposed to be for. At least at one point in the past, the rule that Linus had laid down after discussing things at Kernel Summits was after -rc2, or maybe -rc3 at the latest, the ***only*** fixes that should be sent to Linus would be for regression fixes or for really serious data integrity issues. The concern was that people were pushing bug fixes in -rc5 or -rc6 that were in some cases causing regressions. (As I recall, Linus laid down the law regarding this policy in his own inimitable and colorful style; which today would result in all sorts of tsk, tsking on Hacker News regarding his language. :-) In any case, I've been very conservative in _not_ pushing bug fixes to Linus after -rc3 (unless they are fixing a regression or the bug fix is super-serious); I'd much rather have them cook in the ext4 tree where they can get a lot more testing (a full regression test run for ext4 takes over 24 hours), and for people trying out linux-next. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of holding back changes and trying to avoid the risk of introducing regressions; perhaps this would be a good topic to discuss at the Kernel Summit. Regards, - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html