On 5 August 2013 11:00, Jon Medhurst (Tixy) <tixy@linaro.org> wrote:

> As was mentioned on linaro-kernel the plan is that you should be
> sending me incremental updates as needed.

But who decides what's needed? If what is in 3.10 works, why backport a
different version? And I hadn't planned on spending any time on
backporting new versions or fixes.

For things that are out of tree the advertised policy is that we should be tracking the upstream submissions as far as possible in order to avoid having a "special" version of the code in the LSK. There's two broad reasons for keeping the backport in sync with the upstream version (if there is an upstream version).

One is that if there are changes being made upstream they are hopefully being made for some reason and often those reasons will also apply to the backported version, bug fixes being the most obvious example here.

The other is that if we track what's going on development wise then it reduces the effort required when we do need to do the backporting of the bug fixes or ask people working on the upstream code for help resolving issues. This is the flip side of the problem that frequently exists with people doing development on their production releases and never syncing them with upstream, the benefits go both ways here.