Re: Is Fixes line enough?

[Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> > A question has come up on the linux-wireless ML. If a patch has a "Fixes"
> > line, is that sufficient to get it flagged as a patch in Stable, or is a
> > "Cc: Stable" line also needed?
> 
> Someone actually asked this question at the Maintainer's Summit,
> actually.  The answer was that the Fixes line is not sufficient for
> Greg's scripts; you have to have the "Cc: stable" line as well.  Greg
> tried using the Fixes line as a trigger, but there were too many cases
> where this pulled in commits that weren't really suitable for the
> Stable kernels.  Sasha's machine-learning lash up will use the Fixes
> line as a signal, but if you want to explicitly request that the patch
> should be cherry-picked into Stable, you should have the "Cc: stable"
> line.

FWIW, I brought this up already at KS 2016, see Jon's coverage here:

	https://lwn.net/Articles/705220/

My primary motivation to bring that up back then was to try to reduce the 
number of patches that are taken into -stable while there is no good 
justification for that (by requiring each and every of those having Fixes: 
present as a requirement), but it didn't really lead anywhere.

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs