Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] stable workflow

[Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>]

On 08/03/2016 07:45 AM, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Aug 2016, Greg KH wrote:
>
>>> Has anything changed in the process that'd just make patches like this one
>>> to be not merged these days?
>>
>> We have Guenter's test-bot that has helped out immensely here with this.
>
> That's very good to know, I admit that I have close to zero idea about how
> the stable -rcs are being tested.
>

... and when it doesn't work because I messed it up, we get issues such as 3.18
and 4.1 being broken for mips and sparc64 because a couple of patches which don't
apply to those kernels were tagged with an unqualified Cc: stable and applied.

So, if anything, the one problem I see with the current stable process is
those unqualified stable tags. Maybe those should be deprecated; expecting
stable maintainers to figure out if a patch applies to a given stable branch
or not is a bit too much to ask for. With stable releases as far back as
3.2 (or 338,020 commits as of right now) it is almost guaranteed that a
patch tagged with an unqualified Cc: stable doesn't apply to all branches.

>> It seems most of these can all come down to "we need more testing",
>
> That as well, but the main message I am trying to push here is "we need a
> little bit more thinking while anotating patches for stable".
>
> It might very well be that some variation of what has been just proposed
> elsewhere in this thread (requiring all the stable commits to either
> contain explicit 'Fixes' tag, or be explicitly annotated by the kernel
> version range they should be applied to) would help tremendously on that
> front.
>
>> [1] The people that are doing stable tree testing are doing a great job,
>>      Guenter, Shuah, kernelci, my build-bot, 0-day, etc.
>

Maybe I or someone else can give a 10-15 minute presentation about the current
test efforts to bring everyone up to date on what is being tested and how.
Maybe we should make such a presentation a regular event at major conferences.

Guenter