Re: [ 00/78] 3.3.2-stable review

[Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>]

On Apr 14 Felipe Contreras wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 12:10 PM, Stefan Richter
> <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> > On Apr 14 Felipe Contreras wrote:
> 
> >> Of course, although the difference with the stable kernel would be
> >> very small if the only thing added is an extra rule for acceptance:
> >> "It reverts an earlier patch to 'stable'."
> >
> > It looks like a small difference on the surface, but it isn't.  It would
> > mean "yes, we /do/ forward ports in -stable too in some cases".
> 
> How? There's a lot reverts in mainline, where do they come from? Are
> they forward ports from some ghost trees?

Indeed, reverts that go into mainline can often be called forward-ports:
A subsystem developer applied the revert to his subsystem tree, Linus
merges that tree, and the merge result is technically a forward-port
(except if the pull resulted in a fast-forward instead of a merge).

However, "fix it in stable before mainline" requires to allow forward-ports
in stable for a different reason:  If the fix in mainline gets delayed
until after stable's next branch point, the stable fix needs to be
forward-ported from 3.M.y to 3.N.y.

> If you drop a patch from the stable review queue before it gets into a
> stable release, and then that patch is reverted from mainline, is that
> also a "forward port"?

There is just one fix of one bug, not a fix plus a port of the fix to a
similarly buggy tree.
-- 
Stefan Richter
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