Re: [TECH TOPIC] Rust for Linux

Andrew Lunn
2021-07-20T14:04:57Z

On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 03:38:24PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 3:21 PM Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch> wrote:
> >
> > Part of the issue here is -stable and back porting fixes. If files
> > move around within the tree, it makes this back porting harder. git
> > cherry-pick is a lot less likely to work, it needs more manual
> > intervention. I expect it will make the stable teams job much easier
> > if these files are in the right place from day 1 and never move.
>
> We can definitely move things already if we agree on a particular
> approach -- we definitely do not want to make anybody's job harder.
>
> An alternative could be stating that Rust support will not get
> backports for e.g. the first two or three releases to give it a bit of
> time to mature in-tree; while making it easier to get maintainers
> involved and in general everything rolling.

Let see what the stable team say about that. But it is well known that
it is hard to separate security fixes out from other bug fixes. So by
not back porting, you are potentially leaving open security issues. I
guess these will be in the unsafe code, and that seems to be mostly in
the files we are talking about.

Andrew