Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Stable trees and release time

[Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>]

Hi Greg,

On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 10:56 AM Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 10:32:45AM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > But yeah, it's weak and doesn't solve the primary thing, which is just the
> > size of stable itself.
>
> I've held off on responding so far, but I think this is the big point of
> "fear" that many people seem to have with the stable updates over the
> past years.
>
> Yes, the "size" is bigger than before, but that is because of the
> following things:

[...]

> So yes, things are "bigger" than before, but still, overall, we are only
> accepting a small percentage of patches that hit Linus's tree (12
> patches a day for stable vs. 216 a day for Linus).
>
> Are you also worried that Linus's tree is getting "bigger"?  :)
>
> So we are larger than before, but this is a good thing, because we are
> actually catching more problems than we were before.  Which means your
> older kernels had more bugs...
>
> Anyway, just a comment in that you should not "fear" the increased size,
> it is to be expected as more people pay more attention to Linux,
> combined with the fact that we are still growing.  If the stable patches
> were shrinking, then I would get worried as that would imply that people
> don't care anymore.

So we're slowly evolving to the point where distros/companies/... can just
follow Linus' tree instead, and stable trees are no longer needed, except for
the last released point version (no-one wants to run plain rc1 or rc2) ;-)

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds