On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 06:08:13PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 04/12/20 16:49, Sasha Levin wrote:
On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 09:27:28AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 01/12/20 00:59, Sasha Levin wrote:
It's quite easy to NAK a patch too, just reply saying "no" and it'll be dropped (just like this patch was dropped right after your first reply) so the burden on maintainers is minimal.
The maintainers are _already_ marking patches with "Cc: stable". That
They're not, though. Some forget, some subsystems don't mark anything, some don't mark it as it's not stable material when it lands in their tree but then it turns out to be one if it sits there for too long.
That means some subsystems will be worse as far as stable release support goes. That's not a problem:
- some subsystems have people paid to do backports to LTS releases
when patches don't apply; others don't, if the patch doesn't apply the bug is simply not fixed in LTS releases
Why not? A warning mail is originated and folks fix those up. I fixed a whole bunch of these myself for subsystems I'm not "paid" to do so.
- some subsystems are worse than others even in "normal" releases :)
Agree with that.
(plus backports) is where the burden on maintainers should start and end. I don't see the need to second guess them.
This is similar to describing our CI infrastructure as "second guessing": why are we second guessing authors and maintainers who are obviously doing the right thing by testing their patches and reporting issues to them?
No, it's not the same. CI helps finding bugs before you have to waste time spending bisecting regressions across thousands of commits. The lack of stable tags _can_ certainly be a problem, but it solves itself sooner or later when people upgrade their kernel.
If just waiting with fixing issues is ok until a user might "eventually" upgrade is acceptable then why bother with a stable tree to begin with?