Re: [ 00/19] 3.10.1-stable review

[Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 03:01:17PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
 > <rant>
 >   I'm sitting on top of over 170 more patches that have been marked for
 >   the stable releases right now that are not included in this set of
 >   releases.  The fact that there are this many patches for stable stuff
 >   that are waiting to be merged through the main -rc1 merge window cycle
 >   is worrying to me.
 > 
 >   Why are subsystem maintainers holding on to fixes that are
 >   _supposedly_ affecting all users?  I mean, 21 powerpc core changes
 >   that I don't see until a -rc1 merge?  It's as if developers don't
 >   expect people to use a .0 release and are relying on me to get the
 >   fixes they have burried in their trees out to users.  That's not that
 >   nice.  6 "core" iscsi-target fixes?  That's the sign of either a
 >   broken subsystem maintainer, or a lack of understanding what the
 >   normal -rc kernel releases are supposed to be for.

I get the impression as soon as we hit -rc1, some maintainers immediately
go into "OH SHIT, I CAN'T SEND PATCHES OR LINUS WILL SHOUT AT ME" mode.

And the later in -rc we are, the more reluctant some people seem to be
at sending stuff. Which, for slowing things down as we go through -rc is great,
but not so much when people stop sending _everything_ and start thinking
"I'll just get it in stable in a few weeks".

For .10 I had to start making a list of "shit that's broken that there's
an outstanding patch for" and nagging people to send them week after week.
Every time I reported a new bug I'd hit, I'd have to explain I wasn't running
Linus' tree because there was so much other crap I had to carry just to
get things to a baseline of stability before starting tests.

By rc7 things got a lot better, but if we have fixes sitting around in
git trees for weeks on end with no progress, that kinda sucks.

	Dave