On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 09:47:40AM +0200, Donald Buczek wrote: > On 9/11/23 15:54, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > > We have never guaranteed that Kconfig options will never change in > > stable kernel releases, sorry. > > I didn't want to imply that and I don't expect it. > > It's just _if_ stable really gradually opens up to anything (like code > removals, backports of new features, heuristically or AI selected > patches, performance patches) it IMO loses its function and we could > as well follow mainline, which, I think, is what you are recommending > anyway. When code is removed from stable kernel versions, it is usually for very good reasons, like what happened here. Sorry I can't go into details, but you really wanted this out of your kernel, this was a bugfix :) > We've had bad surprises with more or less every mainline releases > while updates in a stable series could be trusted to go 99% without > thinking. Keeping productions systems on some latest stable gave us > the time to identifying and fix problems with newer series before > making it the designated series for all systems. This worked well. > > If the policy of stable gradually changes, that's tough luck for us. I > wouldn't complain but it would be good to know. And maybe > Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rs should be reviewed. If the policy changes, we will change that document, but for now, we are backporting only bugfixes that are found through explicit tagging, developer requests, manual patch review, and "compare this commit to past commits that were accepted" matching which then gets manual review. thanks, greg k-h
