Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] ARM: three easy patches for coverity-reported issues

From: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
To: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Cc: "QEMU Developers" <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>,
	"Paolo Bonzini" <pbonzini@redhat.com>,
	qemu-stable <qemu-stable@nongnu.org>,
	"Andreas Färber" <afaerber@suse.de>,
	"Patch Tracking" <patches@linaro.org>
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] ARM: three easy patches for coverity-reported issues
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 13:17:51 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <53034F6F.1010905@suse.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAFEAcA8cUn_jc0bEq+MGhQQcPYk6mefuo78P9xAqX7tNXnNsUw@mail.gmail.com>

On 02/18/2014 12:22 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 18 February 2014 11:16, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Il 18/02/2014 12:09, Peter Maydell ha scritto:
>>
>>>> No, we've had that topic before: It's your job as submitter and
>>>> maintainer to flag that appropriately in the commit message, as per QEMU
>>>> Summit 2012.
>>> I don't think this workflow works. I have no idea what
>>> stable's criteria are, and if you rely on people
>>> adding a cc you're going to miss stuff.
>>
>> There isn't really a standard criterion.  It's up to each maintainer to be
>> stricter or looser on what goes to stable.
> My criteria for ARM in the past has typically been "there's
> a new release every three months, anything that got past
> the release testing process for release N is sufficiently
> non-critical it can just go into release N+1".

Unfortunately this doesn't work for distributions. Distros need to 
maintain a stable branch for the lifetime of a release to ensure that 
we're reasonably regression free.

If you indicate that this doesn't apply to ARM it basically means you 
admit that ARM systems are not yet ready for "stable" use by customers 
when they want to use KVM. At least at the point when we agree that 
customers do want to run on a stable base for virtualization on ARM we 
need a working -stable system for critical fixes.

Alex