Lo! I want to provide users with an easier way to search our multitude of mailing lists for reports about issues (aka bugs), as reporting the same kernel problem multiple times has known downsides for everyone involved. That's why I propose to create this new mailing list: linux-issues@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Developers and users reporting or handling issues then can CC it or search it via lore. But this will only fly if the idea has buy-in from at least the core kernel maintainers, to make sure they and the developers actually use it. That's why I'm looking for feedback with this mail and also CCed ksummit-discuss, as that's the easiest way to make sure maintainers get aware of this idea and can raise their voice. Note, there is a second reason why ksummit-discuss is CCed: another reason why I want to create this new list is making it easier to find and track regressions reported to our various mailing lists (often without LKML in CC, as for some subsystems it's seems to be custom to not CC it). Back on the maintainers summit in 2017 it was agreed to create a dedicated list for this purpose (https://lwn.net/Articles/738216/). I even requested a "linux-regressions@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" a while later, but didn't hear anything back; and, sadly, about the same time I started having trouble finding spare time for working on regression tracking. :-/ But I soon will get back into that area: https://linux-regtracking.leemhuis.info/post/hello-world/ Hence it's a good time to prepare some groundwork for that. But these days I think having something like linux-regressions@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx might be over engineered, at least for now: a linux-issues@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with a simple "[regressions]" in the subject will suffice, as that tag is something a lot of people are used to already. And if we think we need that list we can still create it in the future. Or what do you folks think about it? We can obviously bikeshed about the name for the list. I'm sure some people will prefer to use "bugs" instead of "issues" there. I propose "issues" for now, because the new text I've written about reporting kernels issues/bugs uses the word "issues" in the filename, the title, and the body while avoiding "bug" (see Documentation/admin-guide/reporting-issues.rst or https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/reporting-issues.html ). I chose this approach as users are dealing with issues that might or might not be bugs in the kernel. We discussed this before above text was merged, but in the end stayed with issues: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-doc/b5f5dfad-07bb-b518-0dff-3aa340333046@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/ BTW, creating this list will partly solve the second of the "FIXME warning boxes" currently left in that text (two others are solved by patches that are under review currently). The question "Why not simply LKML" will likely pop up, but the thing is: searching for reports there will often turn up patches that improve the kernel and don't fix anything. That makes it hard to find issue reports, especially for users that are not used to deal with mailing lists and their archives. And yes, I'm quite aware that searching linux-issues@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx list obviously won't turn up reports that are filed in bugzilla.kernel.org or some other bug tracking tool. That's okay, as the reporting-issues.rst tells users to look in those places as well. Another "and yes, I'm quite aware" note: sure reporting issues/bugs by mail has downsides and maybe instead of creating yet another mailing list it would be better if all the kernel issues would be reported to a central place like bugzilla.kernel.org. But that tracker doesn't work that well currently, as quite a few of the issues filed there afaics never reach the people that need to be handle them. I don't see that changing any time soon (we had a discussion about this recently: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-doc/20210111194822.4kvl2tx24anyu23k@chatter.i7.local/ ). Creating a new mailing list for issues OTOH is something that can be done quickly and easily to improve the situation without too much hassle. That's why that's my plan currently, unless the discussion that hopefully evolved due to this mail leads to something better. :-D Ciao, Thorsten
