On Mon, 8 Jul 2013, Greg KH wrote:
> > (1) I am a responsible maintainer of kernels for all SUSE enterprise
> > products. As such, I am dealing with -stable trees on a regular
> > basis.
> >
> > I am aware of the fact that -stable team is deferring a big part of the
> > responsibility to the patch authors / maintainers (and thus they are
> > mostly the ones to blame), and also of the fact that properly
> > defining -stable acceptance rules is a very hard task.
> >
> > Still, my gut feeling is that some patches present in the -stable
> > release are obviously not a -stable material.
> >
> > As a basis fo further discussion I can provide a few examples of
> > patches hat went into -stable, although they (?apparently?) should have
> > not, and they caused us headache.
>
> I'd be interested in hearing about this now, as I never want to include
> patches that break things or cause problems for distros, or anyone else
> using the stable branches. Care to take this to stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> so that all of the people involved in the stable stuff can talk about
> it?
Ok, so as this topic seems to have gotten quite some traction even in
other threads ("[Ksummit-2013-discuss] When to push bug fixes to mainline"
etc), let me pick a rather random example for a case study (and yes, I
personally had to suffer with that one quite a lot :) ).
3.0.41 has been released Aug 15 2012. It included a huge random.c update
(upstream commits d2e7c96a, cbc96b75, c5857ccf, 00ce1db1a, c2557a303,
e6d4947b12, a2080a67a, 902c098a, 775f4b29, 2dac8e54f, 3e88bdff,
3e88bdff1c, cf833d0b, 63d7717).
Many of these went into Linus' tree for 3.6, which was released Sep 30
2012. 3.0.41 was released Aug 15 2012 (which is before final release of
3.6) (I hope I got the dates right, I have never been really strong in
history classess).
902c098a was buggy, wasn't marked for stable in the changelog, hasn't been
present in single Linus' major release, and still has been merged into
-stable already. Makes one wonder where did all the rush come from.
Actually the whole series of commits seems (to a rather unbiased observer,
such as myself) to be rather an improvement and forward-pushing
development of a random subsystem. How does/did that qualify for stable?
> Not to say that a in-person discussion about this isn't also a good
> thing to have, I'd be up for that as well.
Thanks,
--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs
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