On Sat, Sep 05, 2020 at 10:02:20AM +0200, SeongJae Park wrote:
From: SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxxx>
On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 09:09:46 +0200 Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 04, 2020 at 04:17:48PM +0200, SeongJae Park wrote:
> > <snip>
> >
> > Stopping right here, if you have fixes that will not cleanly apply, and
> > you think they should be applied, please fix them and send the proper
> > backport. I don't have the cycles to do these on my own.
> >
> > Same for anything else here that you think should be applied but does
> > not cleanly build/apply.
>
> Totally agreed. Actually, I posted a similar report[1] before and received
> similar response. I promised to back-port some of those by myself. That's
> still in my TODO list, but I was unable to get a time to revisit it quite long
> time. From this, I realized that it wouldn't be easy to review, test, and
> backport all of the such suspicious things by myself. Scaling up to multiple
> stable series (the tool says there are 152 fixes and 147 mentions for 4.9.y)
> seems impossible.
>
> For the reason, I updated the tool to make the report to be sent to not only
> the stable maintainers but also the authors of the suspicious commits, because
> the review / test / backport of their own commits would be much easier that
> others. As a result, we were able to find one suspended commit:
> https://lore.kernel.org/stable/CAKfTPtAkOes+HmVabRazhCBBUo0M+QW38q3Zzj_O3O+Ghvc1pA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
That work had already been done before your email was sent.
I too can write a tool that sends out "this patch might be for stable,
will you do the work for it!" emails, but that's a bit rude to ask
others to do your work for you, don't you agree? By asking me and
others to dig through this list, when you said you don't have the time
to do so, feels very odd to me.
I thought the tool and this report are like a very simple form of the CI test
bots like 0day, syzbot, or some kind of static analyzers. Mine has quite large
number of false positives, though. Actually that was my only one concern.
Therefore I thought asking the authors to check this could be a little bit
annoying and therefore I asked them to let me know if they don't want this.
I also thought making an explicit list of false-positive 'Fixes:' could help
someone in the community. Also, I didn't intend to make others do my work
instead, but I just wanted to help the community finding missed patches.
And that's a good goal, but the help we need to accomplish that is in
the manual parts of the process which we can't automate: figuring out
whether a patch really needs to be backported, and doing the actual
backport.
I'd encourage you to pick a small subset of your results and try doing
just that - it's not "all of nothing" and even doing a few of these will
help.
--
Thanks,
Sasha
