On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 08:37:18PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 04:49:20PM +0100, Edward Cree wrote:
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...
It is a little bit harsh to say that.
The autoselection process works good enough for everything outside
of netdev community. The amount of bugs in those stable@ trees is
not such high if you take into account the amount of fixes automatically
brought in.
I'll add that it's funny that we're discussing AUTOSEL in this context
given that a conversation I had with Leon quite a few years back around
issues with Mellanox patches not going to -stable was one of the
triggers for AUTOSEL :)
--
Thanks,
Sasha
