On 2013/7/12 8:50, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > 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. > Looks like each maintainer may have his rule which may differ from the rule laid down by Linus. I have 2 network patches which went into 3.10-rc6, though these two bugs are not regressions but has been there even before the git history. On the other hand, 2 of my cgroup bug fixes were queued for 3.11 with stable tag added. And what about Documentation fixes and updates? Should those patches also follow Linus' rule? I guess people have different opinions. -- 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