On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 07:22:32PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: >On Fri 22-12-17 18:07:23, Sasha Levin wrote: >> I don't try and override maintainers, I mostly try to get fixes out >> of subsystems where maintainers/authors partially (or just don't) >> mark their commits for stable. > >Well, I have see quite some MM patches and I believe we are quite good >at marking patches for stable trees... I also think we we (as the whole >kernel) are much better are using Fixes tag (although it is over used >sometimes). Indeed, mm/ is probably as good as it gets in the kernel. >Moreover it makes more sense to push on those maintainers than try to >substitude them without being so closely familiar with the subsystem. If >missing backports result in bug reports then this just increase the >pressure on those maintainers /me think. Both is happening, but it's difficult to force maintainers into doing anything, as you might have guessed... I'm hoping that one result of this work is a tool we can stick into scripts/ (maybe glue it to checkpatch) that'll alert when the patch is -stable material and suggest adding tags. >> These patches also go through a much longer review process than >> commits that are marked for stable (there are at least 3 emails issued >> for each such commit, and at least 1 week (usually much more) is >> given for reviews). > >Does any of the maintainers read those emails? How many acks/reviewes do >you get for those patches for the stable tree? To be honest I tend to I get a fair amount of reviews which seems to be slightly above what -stable tagged patches get, which is good. Acks are not expected, and are not happening too often. >ignore those patchbombs most of the time because it is simply impossible >to handle them for me. I try to help backporting obvious fixes but >reviewing seemingly randomly selected patch which applies and changelog >looks reasonaly is simply out of my time budget. Not to mention that >this is not just about the patch itself but also the tree it is applied >to and other patches that are in the same pile. I'd hope that these patches aren't "random" :) For some background, this is based on Julia Lawall's work (and paper https://soarsmu.github.io/papers/icse12-patch.pdf). -- Thanks, Sasha