On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 11:18 AM, Linus Torvalds <
torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 8:37 AM, Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 4/18/2017 4:13 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm not sure who those people actually are, but I suspect this list
> >> contains people who can point to each tech lead.. I think it's Laura
> >> Abbott for Fedora, for example?
> >
> > There really is no pain point for Fedora.  They take a very simple
> > approach: in rawhide, they pull latest git once you hit the -rc cycles
> > and build it, otherwise it's the latest released kernel; in actual
> > releases, they pull stable tree point releases as they are released (not
> > long term stable, they upgrade to a new stable tree fairly regularly).
> > They really don't do much in the way of having to integrate changes into
> > their kernel (intentionally), it's just a constant rolling update game
> > using newer and newer tarballs.  So, the pain is not in Fedora, it's in
> > RHEL.  What we do there is so totally different from Fedora and hurts so
> > bad as a developer...but I don't know if you really care to even talk
> > about that at the summit since, to be fair, it's largely a consequence
> > of our business model.
>
>
There are certainly pain points in Fedora, very much related to this
model.  The approach is simple, the implementation could be better.  Our
pain points are just very different from the RHEL pain points.
For instance, while stable has been a great success over the years, the
policy is no fixes in stable until they are in head.  Unfortunately a lot
of simple fixes end up in queued in maintainer trees for -next and never
end up in head until the next merge window.   I don't know what the answer
here is, changing the stable policy in this regard doesn't seem like the
best solution.


> Yeah, I don't think we can do much about distros that intentionally
> want to stay behind and backport. Admittedly Android seems to be very
> much in that camp too, but I'd at least want to talk to them more.
> RHEL I feel knows what it's doing and isn't causing the kinds of
> issues Android is anyway.
>
> That said, even with Fedora I think Laura was at the KS last year, and
> did talk about what she sees as the stable kernel process. So Fedora
> may not be a "painpoint", but may well be relevant for the "meet with
> people and talk about process issues once a year".
>
> Of course, if it really is a question of "we have no problems and no
> reason to even be there" for Fedora, then that's one (or two) less
> people to worry about ;)


Laura is a good candidate to discuss the Fedora pain points.

Justin