Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] The amount of -stable emails

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

On Tue, 05 Aug 2025 23:39:58 +0200,
Jiri Kosina wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 5 Aug 2025, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> > > > This proposal is coming as a followup to the brief IRC discussion
> > > > that happened a few months back.
> > > > 
> > > > The amount of e-mails that are coming (with maintainers directly
> > > > CCed) as a result of patches being merged to -stable is so
> > > > overwhelming that I am not sure that people are making any productive
> > > > use of it whatsoever.
> > > > 
> > > > I am personally pretty much ignoring most of it, as (a) I wouldn't
> > > > have time to do anything else otherwise (b) I don't have a sufficient
> > > > motivation / time to invest effort into stable in the fist place.
> > > > 
> > > > I feel it'd be beneficial to discuss this, and (depending on the
> > > > outcome)perhaps make it opt-in (or opt-out) at least, with
> > > > people/subsystems  having means how to be excluded from all that ...
> > > > ?
> > > 
> > > Actually, if stable emails just had a header tag, it would be easy for
> > > procmail to sort them out ... which is what I've been asking for for
> > > years.  X-Stable-Base: and X-Stable: seem to be reasonably common and
> > > catch most of it, but codifying the use in the kernel documentation and
> > > using them consistently would really help.
> > 
> > These "a patch has been added to the stable queue" has had the following
> > X- tags on them since August 2023:
> > 
> > 	X-stable: commit
> > 	X-Patchwork-Hint: ignore
> > 
> > and I'm sure I only added that because you, or someone else, asked :)
> > 
> > You can also filter on stable-commits@vger.kernel.org, which is what I
> > do locally.
> > 
> > So filter away!
> 
> The question is whether it's really worth all the e-mail traffic this is 
> generating, if people are just filtering those away.
> 
> For context searches if some particular information regarding stable 
> patch history is needed, we can still do lore/lei queries nicely and 
> easily.
> Is there any other usecase (that people are actually actively using) for 
> it?

In rare cases, patches are incorrectly applied.  That can't be
verified without the actual patch.

Usually it happens with a cherry-pick with fuzz, so we might be able
to catch suspected ones, but the inspection of the patch is still
needed.


Takashi