On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 05:39:41PM +0100, Greg KH wrote:

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 04:14:14PM +0100, David Sterba wrote:

...

Hi,

would it be possible to have a git repository with all patches that are submitted to stable@ but don't apply directly?

I get notified by mail, that's fine though it's not that convenient to see all the pending patches for backport to a given version.

My proposal:

• create a separate stable-unapplied git repository

• if a patch does not apply to a given version, it's stored as-is to a directory of the base version (like 4.4)

• once a fixed version is applied to stable-queue.git/released-4.4, the patch in the other repo is deleted

I believe this can be highly automated and once implemented would not too much additional work to the stable workflow. I could possibly write a scraper of the mail archives to pick the patches and manage the repository but I think that a central repository could help other maintainers too or to spread the load to all interested developers.

If something like that already exists, please let me know.

Nothing like this exists, sorry.

And if you want to automate this, wonderful, but I do not have any time to do so, and it does not fit into my workflow at all. Patches that do not apply are the exception by far, not the rule, so I doubt this would really help out much.

And of course, the i915 developers would just ignore it, as they hold the record for patches that never apply, and then never send patches in as they are already 6-8 months ahead :)

Note, what does work today is Sasha's bot that finds patches that are cc: stable and tries to apply them to older kernels and sends you an email if the patch fails. That is running today in semi-frequent waves, and we have gotten backports sent to the list before the patch lands in Linus's tree, which is great. So you can take advantage of this now if you want to.

thanks,

greg k-h

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 07:19:46PM +0100, David Sterba wrote:

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 05:39:41PM +0100, Greg KH wrote:

...

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 04:14:14PM +0100, David Sterba wrote:

...

Hi,

would it be possible to have a git repository with all patches that are submitted to stable@ but don't apply directly?

I get notified by mail, that's fine though it's not that convenient to see all the pending patches for backport to a given version.

My proposal:

• create a separate stable-unapplied git repository

• if a patch does not apply to a given version, it's stored as-is to a directory of the base version (like 4.4)

• once a fixed version is applied to stable-queue.git/released-4.4, the patch in the other repo is deleted

I believe this can be highly automated and once implemented would not too much additional work to the stable workflow. I could possibly write a scraper of the mail archives to pick the patches and manage the repository but I think that a central repository could help other maintainers too or to spread the load to all interested developers.

If something like that already exists, please let me know.

Nothing like this exists, sorry.

And if you want to automate this, wonderful, but I do not have any time to do so, and it does not fit into my workflow at all. Patches that do not apply are the exception by far, not the rule, so I doubt this would really help out much.

I'm concerned about patches that are sent to sable but don't get applied in the end. IOW dropped on the floor, unless somebody cares, which is probably the maintainers that are known to be overloaded.

So, I'm looking for some kind of help, to extend the stable workflow and address the problem where it happens and where the whole mail and git machinery already is.

The number of unapplied patches has raised recently for me because I started to closely examine which stable versions could be affected. And go as far as 4.4.

Why there are otherwise only a few patches that don't apply, I can only speculate and I think that differs by subsystem. That stable kernels are potentially missing stability fixes should be a concern in general. But well, it seems I have to help myself here.

You can easily just filter on the FAILED emails and see what happens there if you want to track these. I figure that if I send out the email and no one responds with a backported patch, then no one really cares about that issue on that old kernel, so we are fine. If they did care, they would do the backport :)

Again, look at Sasha's emails, that might be what you are looking for.

Or better yet, create something automated on your own that does the "did this apply or not" test for you, that way you get to see what happens here much more easily and only for the subsystems you care about.

thanks,

greg k-h