Hi!
I believe that -stable would be more useful without AUTOSEL process.
There has to be a way to ensure that security fixes that weren't properly tagged make it to stable anyway. So, AUTOSEL is necessary, at least in some form. I think that debating *whether it should exist* is a distraction from what's actually important, which is that the current AUTOSEL process has some specific problems, and these specific problems need to be fixed...
I agree with you, that we need autosel and we also need autosel to be better. I actually see Pavel's mail as a datapoint (or "anecdote", if you will) in support of that; the autosel process currently works so badly that a long-time contributor thinks it's worse than nothing.
Sasha, what do you need to help you make this better?
One would probably need to define "better" and "so badly". As a user of -stable kernels, I consider that they've got much better over the
Well, we have Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst . If we wanted to define "better", we should start documenting what the real rules are for the patches in the stable tree.
I agree that -stable works quite well, but the real rules are far away from what is documented.
I don't think AUTOSEL works well. I believe we should require positive reply from patch author on relevant maintainer before merging such patch to -stable.
Best regards, Pavel