On 14/04/2020 16:16, Sasha Levin wrote: > Are you suggesting that a commit without a fixes tag is never a fix? Because fixes are much more likely than non-fixes to have a Fixes tag, the absence of a fixes tag is Bayesian evidence that a commit is not a fix. It's of course not incontrovertible evidence, since (as you note) some fixes do not have a Fixes tag, but it does increase the amount of countervailing evidence needed to conclude a commit is a fix. In this case it looks as if the only such evidence was that the commit message included the phrase "NULL pointer dereference". > Fixes can (and should) come in during a merge window as well. They are > not put on hold until the -rc releases. In networking-land, fixes generally go through David's 'net' tree, rather than 'net-next'; the only times a fix goes to net-next are when a) the code it's fixing is only in net-next; i.e. it's a fix to a previous patch from the same merge window. In this case the fix should not be backported, since the code it's fixing will not appear in stable kernels. b) the code has changed enough between net and net-next that different fixes are appropriate for the two trees. In this case, only the fix that went to 'net' should be backported (since it's the one that's appropriate for net, it's probably more appropriate for stable trees too); the fix that went to 'net-next' should not. Or's original phrasing was that this patch "was pushed to net-next", which is not quite exactly the same thing as -next vs. -rc (though it's similar because of David's system of closing net-next for the duration of the merge window). And this, again, is quite strong Bayesian evidence that the patch should not be selected for stable. To be honest, that this needs to be explained to you does not inspire confidence in the quality of your autoselection process... GregKH wrote: > we can't get make this a "only take if I agree" as there are _many_ > subsystem maintainers who today never mark anything for stable trees The complaint seems to be that Sasha's threshold for "this looks stable- worthy" is too low; maybe setting it that low should be opt-in, while patches for subsystems that haven't opted in should need to be "obviously" fixes for them to get autoselected, on the grounds that having to watch the autosel messages and pounce on the ones to which the answer is "no no no, applying that to stable kernels will break them horribly" is _also_ extra work for a maintainer. (Especially if, a month after NACKing them, the same patch shows up again in another autosel batch, which — unless my memory is playing tricks on me — has happened to me at least once.) -ed
