Re: Please create the email alias do-not-apply-to-stable@kernel.org -> /dev/null

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@kernel.org>]

Em Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:16:26 +0200
Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> escreveu:

> On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 09:09:26AM +0100, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > Em Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:48:18 +0200
> > Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info> escreveu:
> >   
> > > Hi kernel.org helpdesk!
> > > 
> > > Could you please create the email alias
> > > do-not-apply-to-stable@kernel.org which redirects all mail to /dev/null,
> > > just like stable@kernel.org does?
> > > 
> > > That's an idea GregKH brought up a few days ago here:
> > > https://lore.kernel.org/all/2024041123-earthling-primarily-4656@gregkh/
> > > 
> > > To quote:
> > >   
> > > > How about:
> > > > 	cc: <do-not-apply-to-stable@kernel.org> # Reason goes here, and must be present
> > > > 
> > > > and we can make that address be routed to /dev/null just like
> > > > <stable@kernel.org> is?    
> > > 
> > > There was some discussion about using something shorter, but in the end
> > > there was no strong opposition and the thread ended a a few days ago.  
> > 
> > Heh, a shorter name would make it a lot easier to remember, specially
> > since not wanting a patch to go to stable is an exception... I bet
> > I'll never remember the right syntax, needing to look at the docs
> > every time it would be used.
> > 
> > IMO, something like:
> > 	no-stable
> > or
> > 	nostable
> > 
> > would do the trick and would be a lot easier to remember.
> > 
> > Btw, IMO, it won't hurt accepting more than one variant that
> > could be allowed, e. g. using a regular expression like:
> > 
> > 	(do)?[-_]?(nt|not?).*stable  
> 
> That's not going to work at the mailing list server, or with my scripts,
> sorry.

A setting like that would likely be at exim (or similar). Most smtp servers
allow some sort of wildcards, as those are used to pass or not e-mails to
list servers and/or handle custom mail forward rules.

At client level, one could use dovecot with pigeonhole to have sieve
rules to filter e-mails. That's what I do here.
 
> > at the scripts used by stable developers - and maybe at the ML server - to
> > catch different variations won't hurt, as it sounds likely that people will
> > end messing up with a big name like "do-not-apply-to-stable", typing
> > instead things like:
> > 
> > 	do_not_apply_to_stable
> > 	dont-apply-to-stable
> > 
> > and other variants.  
> 
> I want this very explicit that someone does not want this applied, and
> that it has a reason to do so.  And if getting the email right to do so
> is the issue with that, that's fine.  This is a very rare case that
> almost no one should normally hit.

Yeah, agreed: those are very rare exceptions. I remember just one or 
two cases where a media fix patch couldn't be queued to stable. 
The already-existing workflow worked for those.

> And again, if maintainers don't want their tree to have Fixes: and
> AUTOBOT run on them, we can easily add that to our lists.  That's the
> simpler and more explicit thing to do for those that do not want to have
> anything backported they do not explicitly mark as such (some subsystems
> do this already, like kvm and -mm and xfs, it's fine!).  This all is
> here because of maintainers who do NOT want to do that.

From my side, I'm fine with whatever-explicit-long-filter-email.

Regards,
Mauro