Hi Takashi, On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 06:40:39PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote: > IMO, one of the reasons is the nature of stable-release: the stable > tree is released soon after reviews of patches, so no actual > regression tests can be done before the release. > > For finding a regression, patch reviews won't be enough; all patches > have been already reviewed, thus essentially they must be all > positive/good fixes. And the compile is OK. So what's the problem? > > Maybe some QA period before the release might help, but who would > care? (Especially under the situation where everybody has own x.y > stable tree?) Almost nobody *tests* the previews. Except the few regular testers, but they test in a finite environment so there is very little coverage in the end. I'm not dismissing their work, because without them we'd have zero testers. I'd prefer to have more than we currently have. But it's also almost impossible to test reviews on servers, so a wide category of fixes is probably never tested anyway during previews (eg: RAID cards, or fixes for bugs affecting large amounts of memory/disk/cpus). What makes the success of -stable is that Greg is able to re-release very quickly when a bug is reported, sometimes even the same day. It's something I'm totally incapable of, not having enough contiguous spare time to work regularly enough on releases. That's the real key to success. As a user, I look at the changes between versions and generally only upgrade if something seems to be hitting me. That way I need less updates and skip more regressions. And I'm sure most users do the same. Regards, Willy -- 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